It has come to my attention that there is at least one MPI user who considers an MPI_Abort call to be a legitimate way to terminate an application that has reached a correct result. I gather the situation is that as soon as any task has a result it decides is satisfactory, whatever the other tasks are working on becomes instantly irrelevant. Is this a situation other members of the Forum consider as common or at least legitimate? I can see the approach as legitimate but question the use of MPI_Abort. Would you regard it as legitimate to consider an application that ended with a call to MPI_Abort to be successful? If so, should we say something explicit in the MPI_Abort description? Should there be something new like MPI_Quit which is defined as a "correct" single task termination of an MPI application? We currently say that MPI_Abort makes a "best attempt" which to me implies it is not guaranteed by the standard that it will really leave the system as good as new. I am not aware of anybody having a problem making MPI_Abort a total termination of processes and recovery of resources but the escape hatch is there for an MPI implementation that was unable to do a perfectly clean Abort. Dick Dick Treumann - MPI Team IBM Systems & Technology Group Dept X2ZA / MS P963 -- 2455 South Road -- Poughkeepsie, NY 12601 Tele (845) 433-7846 Fax (845) 433-8363