Suprenum, PARMACS and Transputers: A personal view on the European way to MPI

Abstract

In the early days of parallel computing, application programming was a tough job. In the absence of a programming standard, people had to rewrite their codes whenever a new machine arrived. The idea came up to establish a standard interface, but how should it look like? In Europe two candidates emerged: A channel-based model favored in particular by the British Transputer community, and an endpoint-based one à la PARMACS which the author had developed together with friends at Argonne National Laboratory. The author looks back on the difficult process towards a common European standard which eventually became one of the roots of the MPI initiative.