Answer: 1. MPI stands for the Message Passing Interface. Written by the MPI Forum (a large committee comprising of a cross-section between industry and research representatives), MPI is a standardized API typically used for parallel and/or distributed computing. The MPI standard is comprised of 2 documents: MPI-1 (published in 1994) and MPI-2 (published in 1996). MPI-2 is, for the most part, additions and extensions to the original MPI-1 specification. The MPI-1 and MPI-2 documents can be downloaded from the official MPI Forum web site: http://www.mpi-forum.org/. Open MPI is an open source, freely available implementation of both the MPI-1 and MPI-2 documents. The Open MPI software achieves high performance; the Open MPI project is quite receptive to community input.

Answer: 2. There are many resources available on the internet for learning MPI. * The definitive reference for MPI is the MPI Fourm Web site. It has copies of the MPI standards documents and all of the errata. This is not recommended for beginners, but is an invaluable reference. * Several books on MPI are available (search your favorite book sellers for availability): o MPI: The Complete Reference, Marc Snir et al. (an annotated version of the MPI-1 and MPI-2 standard; a 2 volume set, also known as "The orange book" and "The yellow book") o Using MPI, William Gropp et al. (2nd edition, also known as "The purple book") o Parallel Programming With MPI, Peter Pacheco o ...and others. This is not a definitive list! * An excellent web-based MPI tutorial is offered by the NCSA. This is a great place for beginners. * The LAM/MPI web site has links to a few tutorials. * Last but not least, searching for "MPI tutorial" on Google turns up a wealth of information (some good, some bad)