On Sep 12, 2008, at 5:00 PM, Erez Haba wrote:

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is there some other perceived gain beyond MPI-based ISV apps being able to conveniently ship a single binary?

Yes there is. We discussed one example during the MPI conference. There is a great benefit for tools, especially for tools that are using the PMPI interface. Many implementers ship their mpi implementation as a dynamically loaded binary; vendors like Microsoft, Intel HP and others. As such it is more difficult for tools to plugin between the application and the mpi implementation; it is not impossible but still more difficult.

I guess it depends on the type of tool, no? The parallel debuggers have gotten along fine without an ABI because they don't hook in at the MPI API layer. Alternate mechanisms exist for them to find out the exact value of MPI_COMM_WORLD (for example). Expansions of this concept are just being introduced into MPI-3.0 for other kinds of tools, too. But if there are oodles of PMPI-based tools that want an ABI, I would encourage them to publicly speak out -- just like anyone who both wants and will actually use an ABI should publicly speak out.

Having an API allows MPI implementers, ISV's, tools developers and end user to verify the application with a tool like ISP (University of Utha), without the special need from any of the other parties.

I think you mean ABI, right? -- Jeff Squyres Cisco Systems