DEBUT SET FOR COMPLEX COMPUTING "ALL FOR ONE" STANDARD.

Scientists and engineers who have to make extremely complex calculations favor a computing approach known as parallel processing. Parallel processing is a way to break up a computing problem into pieces that various processors--the "brains" inside computers--can work on simultaneously. It produces extraordinary results, allowing people to make calculations in a week that previously would have taken a year.

While parallel processing has been around for years, many scientists have been frustrated in their efforts to use it. It is easy to create a parallel processing computer network if the computers were all made by the same company. Yet harnessing the combined computing power of machines made by different manufacturers has been much more difficult. A new voluntary standard, the Interoperable Message Passing Interface, eliminates many of those problems.

The first public demonstrations of the IMPI took place at the Supercomputing 2000 conference in Dallas in November 2000.

Computer scientists at NIST have coordinated work on the new standard. NIST teamed up with some of the world's largest computer hardware and software manufacturers to develop the IMPI. NIST also has created a web-based conformance tester for IMPI.