What is Microsoft MPI?

If you've been working with High-Performance Computing (HPI) and distributed systems (or, have watched closely the installer of latest SQL Server versions), you might have run into the term "MPI".

MPI in this context stands for the open Message Passing Interface standard. This is a standard that defines how (distributed) applications can efficiently and securely share blocks of memory. This makes operations faster compared to, for example, TCP/IP communication between two applications.

The standard has its own pages at the MPI Forum. For example, you might wish to read the overview document.

Now, the question on the title of this blog post was "What is Microsoft MPI?" The answer is: Microsoft MPI, or MS-MPI for short, is the Microsoft implementation of the MPI standard.