The message passing interface effort began in the summer of 1991 when a small group of researcherxnsresearchers started discussions at a mountain retreat in Austria. Out of that discussion came a Workshop on Standards for Message Passing in a Distributed Memory Environment, held on April 29–30, 1992 in [[Williamsburg, Virginia]].<ref>{{cite report |id= ORNL/TM-12147 |osti= 10170156 |author= Walker DW |date= August 1992 |title= Standards for message-passing in a distributed memory environment |url= https://technicalreports.ornl.gov/1992/3445603661204.pdf |institution= Oak Ridge National Lab., TN (United States), Center for Research on Parallel Computing (CRPC) |pages= 25 |access-date= 2019-08-18 }}</ref> Attendees at Williamsburg discussed the basic features essential to a standard message-passing interface and established a working group to continue the standardization process. [[Jack Dongarra]], [[Tony Hey]], and David W. Walker put forward a preliminary draft proposal, "MPI1", in November 1992. In November 1992 a meeting of the MPI working group took place in Minneapolis and decided to place the standardization process on a more formal footing. The MPI working group met every 6 weeks throughout the first 9 months of 1993. The draft MPI standard was presented at the Supercomputing '93 conference in November 1993.<ref>{{cite conference |title= MPI: A Message Passing Interface |author= The MPI Forum, CORPORATE |date= November 15–19, 1993 |conference= Supercomputing '93 |conference-url= http://supercomputing.org/ |book-title= Proceedings of the 1993 ACM/IEEE conference on Supercomputing |publisher= ACM |___location= Portland, Oregon, USA |pages= 878–883 |isbn= 0-8186-4340-4 |doi= 10.1145/169627.169855 }}</ref> After a period of public comments, which resulted in some changes in MPI, version 1.0 of MPI was released in June 1994. These meetings and the email discussion together constituted the MPI Forum, membership of which has been open to all members of the [[High-performance computing | high-performance-computing]] community.
The MPI effort involved about 80 people from 40 organizations, mainly in the United States and Europe. Most of the major vendors of [[concurrent computer]]s were involved in the MPI effort, collaborating with researchers from universities, government laboratories, and [[Private industry|industry]].
