On Apr 5, 2010, at 4:42 PM, N.M. Maclaren wrote:

I agree with Richard's reservations, incidentally. About the best that can be done is to specify an MPI_Quit that stops the calling process cleanly (in the language sense) and has the effect of MPI_Abort on the others. But, as I said, even that is tricky to implement on some systems and may not be reliable.

You mentioned this in an earlier post -- can you explain some issues? For example, you mention it might be difficult with systems that use sysv shared memory. Why? I ask with the *assumption* that the MPI implementation can/will have some kind of helper run-time system around that can do whatever cleanup is required (MPI-2 dynamics more-or-less require this anyway). Keep in mind that I'm not saying that the run-time system has to be part of the MPI implementation -- it may simply be provided on the system. For example: if sysv memory segments are left lying around because MPI processes are killed by the run-time system, a high-quality run-time system should be able to clean up the shared memory as well (or at least provide hooks such that MPI processes can tell the run-time system about resources that would need to be cleaned up in the event of untimely MPI process deaths, such as sysv shared memory segments). Is that a bad assumption? -- Jeff Squyres [email protected] For corporate legal information go to: http://www.cisco.com/web/about/doing_business/legal/cri/