Open MPI is a Message Passing Interface (MPI) library project combining technologies and resources from several other projects (FT-MPI, LA-MPI, LAM/MPI, and PACX-MPI).

These four institutions comprise the founding members of the Open MPI development team.

Open MPI aims to use the best ideas and technologies from the individual projects and create one world-class open-source MPI implementation that excels in all areas.

The Open MPI project specifies several top-level goals: The Open MPI code has 3 major code modules: Open MPI development is performed within a consortium of many industrial and academic partners.

The consortium also covers several other software projects such as the hwloc (Hardware Locality) library which takes care of discovering and modeling the topology of parallel platforms.