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
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