BMI has been implemented as a user level library with modules to support various network protocols. Although designed for use with PVFS2, BMI is an independent library which may be useful in other environments as well.
BMI provides reliability, message ordering, and flow control. If a particular underlying protocol does not provide one of these features, then BMI is responsible for implementing it.
Currently all modules are added to BMI statically at compile time. These could be implemented as runtime loadable modules if needed, however.