Twenty-nine papers from the July 1996 Message Passing Interface (MPI) conference showing the emerging importance of MPI as a standard for performance portable parallel programming. The presenters demonstrate several vital areas in the field involving implementations, extensions to the existing MPI standard, language issues, applications, debugging, and performance evaluations, including intersecting analyses of graphics and object-orientated MPI for cutting edge programmers. Includes illustrations and code. Lacks an index. Annotation c. by Book News, Inc., Portland, Or.