An international survey on MPI users

The Message Passing Interface (MPI) plays a crucial part in the parallel computing ecosystem, a driving force behind many of the high-performance computing (HPC) successes. To maintain its relevance to the user community-and in particular to the growing HPC community at large-the MPI standard needs to identify and understand the MPI users' concerns and expectations, and adapt accordingly to continue to efficiently bridge the gap between users and hardware. This questionnaire survey was conducted using two online questionnaire frameworks and has gathered more than 850 answers from 42 countries since February 2019. Some of preceding surveys of MPI uses are questionnaire surveys like ours, while others are conducted either by analyzing MPI programs to reveal static behavior or by using profiling tools to analyze the dynamic runtime behavior of MPI jobs. Our survey is different from other questionnaire surveys in terms of its larger number of participants and wide geographic spread. As a result, it is possible to illustrate the current status of MPI users more accurately and with a wider geographical distribution. In this report, we will show some interesting findings, compare the results with preceding studies when possible, and provide some recommendations for MPI Forum based on the findings.