MPICH development began in 1992, when a standard for message passing in parallel and distributed computing was still being discussed. MPICH tracked the development of the MPI standard as it evolved. This served dual purpose: to prove that the MPI standard could be implemented as defined, and that it could be done efficiently on all major platforms.
Argonne National Laboratory and
Mississippi State University jointly developed early versions (MPICH1) as
public domain software. The CH part of the name was derived from "Chameleon", which was a portable parallel programming library developed by
William Gropp, one of the founders of MPICH. In 2001, work began on a new code base to replace the MPICH1 code and support the MPI-2 standard. Until November 2012, this project was known as "MPICH2". As of November 2012, the MPICH2 project renamed itself to simply "MPICH". MPICH v3.0 implements the MPI-3.0 standard. MPICH v4.x implements the MPI-4.x standard. MPICH is one of the most popular implementations of MPI. It is used as the foundation for many other MPI implementations, including IBM MPI (for
Blue Gene), Intel MPI, Cray MPI, Microsoft MPI, CDAC MPI (C-MPI), Myricom MPI, OSU MVAPICH/MVAPICH2, and many others. == MPICH derivatives ==