Mpich is a robust and flexible implementation of the mpi (message passing interface). mpi is often used with parallel or distributed computing projects. mpich is a multi-platform, configurable system (development, execution, libraries, etc) for mpi. it can achieve parallelism using networked machines or using multitasking on a single machine.

this version is compiled with ch_shmem support, which runs in shared memory. this method is faster than ch_p4 or ch_p4mpd on smp machines, but cannot be used on a cluster.