The Message Passing Interface (MPI) is an extremely successful parallel programming model, and it is expected to be a core component for exascale applications. In spite of its success, there are growing gaps between MPI and system and application architectures. In this talk, I will describe current and ongoing efforts to advance the state of the art in scalable parallel programming models through MPI. I will discuss the recently released MPI 3.0 standard, with a focus on the new one-sided communication interface. This interface enables a broad range asynchronous data access techniques and provides portable support for globally accessible distributed data, two parallel programming idioms that will be of increasing importance on future systems.