I've started looking into the OpenMPI community (open-mpi.org), and what documentation resources are provided. Looks a bit slim at the moment, with most of the documentation in the form of man pages, provided, by the way, by our own ClusterTools team.

OpenMPI is a community project to provide open source development of the MPI-2 API for message-passing parallelism over distributed, clustered, systems.

MPI has been around for awhile now. I first became involved 15 years ago when a group of us formed Applied Parallel Research to develop a tool to automatically parellelize Fortran programs, using MPI.

Current documentation for the MPI 2.0 specs (see http://www.mpi-forum.org/) is not a complete spec -- it builds on the MPI 1.0 spec. A single, merged spec, along the lines of what the OpenMP consortium has done for OpenMP 2.5 (openmp.org) would be desired. But MPI 2.0 is much more complicated than OpenMP.

But, in true open source fashion, it's worth starting a community project to provide a single source OpenMPI spec.

Lets see what happens.