Besides the more formal methods mentioned by Aleks below, there is a common programming style approach to solve this problem: put the variable extra in a module. The compiler has to assume that any non-intrinsic procedure reference might access the module, and hence access or modify the variable. This technique generally avoids performance hits that might be associated with some others - in particular, the VOLATILE attribute can shut down almost all optimization for a variable. I would note that this is a general problem when calling library routines (typically written in C) that stash a copy of a pointer for later use in a different routine. This is not isolated to MPI. I recently saw the same issue with the fftw package. Using a module solved that person's problem. Cheers, Bill Aleksandar Donev wrote:

Ian asked:

...

...

Is there a standard-conformant way to indicate that extra may be accessed or modified during the calls to mpi_comm_dup and mpi_comm_free?

And Jim responded:

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Not now. This is incorrect. There are ways to do what Ian asks for above, in fact, two attributes cover it, notably, TARGET and VOLATILE or a combination of both. The right one in this context is the TARGET attribute. Your array extra *must* have the TARGET attribute. In fact, using C interop as I suggested and thus using C_LOC, requires the attribute (I am sure the vendor exentsion LOC doesn't because extensions don't worry about fine details like this---this is why we usually turn them down in the committee!).

It is perfectly legal in Fortran 95, and all subsequent versions, for a routine to save a pointer to a TARGET, and then later use it during a call to a procedure. Unless the compiler can prove otherwise, it is not allowed to move code past calls to unknown routines, since it does not know whether targets are affected.

What is not allowed or supported, and is needed for non-blocking communication, is to modify the array extra while the Fortran code is executing (asynchronously), not necessarily during a procedure call. If you put a VOLATILE argument that will be handled too. But it will also make any use of the said array inefficient.

To repeat: Jim, this is a separate issue from ASYNCHRONOUS data transfers and should not be mixed under that banner.

Best, Aleks _______________________________________________ mpi3-fortran mailing list [email protected] http://lists.mpi-forum.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/mpi3-fortran

-- Bill Long [email protected] Fortran Technical Support & voice: 651-605-9024 Bioinformatics Software Development fax: 651-605-9142 Cray Inc., 1340 Mendota Heights Rd., Mendota Heights, MN, 55120