I read the first post, and now reading the second, and its difficult to parse because I'm not in academia.<p>As far as I can tell, MPI is actually a standard/protocol for doing distributed computation, much like Hadoop & Spark. (Confused as to why I've never heard about it before - does it get absolutely 0 use outside of academia? Why?)<p>If I have this right, then a more general title is "Specialized high performance machines are on the way out, commodity cluster computing is the future"