MPI has long been considered the de facto standard for parallel programming. One of the primary strengths of MPI is its continuously evolving nature that allows it to absorb and incorporate the best practices in parallel computing in a standard and portable form. The MPI Forum has recently announced the MPI-3 standard and is working on the MPI-4 standard to extend traditional message passing into more dynamic, one-sided and fault tolerant communication capabilities. Nevertheless, given the disruptive architectural trends for Exascale computing, there is room for more. In this talk, I'll first describe some of the capabilities that have been added in the recent MPI-3 standard and those that are being considered for the upcoming MPI-4 standard. Next I'll describe some research efforts to extend MPI to work in massively multithreaded and heterogeneous environments for highly dynamic and irregular applications.

Dr. Pavan Balaji holds appointments as a Computer Scientist at the Argonne National Laboratory, as an Institute Fellow of the Northwestern-Argonne Institute of Science and Engineering at Northwestern University, and as a Research Fellow of the Computation Institute at the University of Chicago. He leads the Programming Models and Runtime Systems group at Argonne. His research interests include parallel programming models and runtime systems for communication and I/O, modern system architecture (multi-core, accelerators, complex memory subsystems, high-speed networks), and cloud computing systems. He has more than 100 publications in these areas and has delivered nearly 120 talks and tutorials at various conferences and research institutes. Dr. Balaji is a recipient of several awards including the U.S. Department of Energy Early Career award in 2012, TEDxMidwest Emerging Leader award in 2013, Crain's Chicago 40 under 40 award in 2012, Los Alamos National Laboratory Director's Technical Achievement award in 2005, Ohio State University Outstanding Researcher award in 2005, six best paper awards and various others. He has served as a chair or editor for nearly 50 journals, conferences and workshops, and as a technical program committee member in numerous conferences and workshops. He is a senior member of the IEEE and a professional member of the ACM. More details about Dr. Balaji are available at http://www.mcs.anl.gov/~balaji.