This topic describes MPI's collective data movement routines. This family of routines is a convenient way to handle moving data among processes. Specific functions are available to handle most common data movement needs, including broadcasting, scattering, and gathering data.

MPI provides three categories of collective data-movement routines in which one process either sends to or receives from all processes: broadcast, gather, and scatter. There are also allgather and alltoall routines, which require all processes both to send and receive data. The gather, scatter, allgather, and alltoall routines have variable-data versions. For their variable data ("v") versions, each process can send and/or receive a different number of elements. The list of MPI collective data movement routines are:

• broadcast
• gather, gatherv
• scatter, scatterv
• allgather, allgatherv
• alltoall, alltoallv

Now, let's take a look at the functionality and syntax of these routines.