So this is not really appropriate for the MPI standard language, but more of a user experience question. In fact this is a much larger question that implementations have to struggle with already. If a process fails in the application (either by external causes or by calling MPI_Abort), what should 'mpirun' return as its exit status? If the application intends to handle the failure and continue running after recovering then they may expect that as long as MPI_Finalize is called in all remaining processes that 'mpirun' return '0' or success. But if no process calls MPI_Finalize (because they either called MPI_Abort or terminated abnormally) that it return a non-zero value - probably one of the values that they set in MPI_Abort, if possible. Of course there is the case where the failure occurs during MPI_Finalize, to which the MPI implementation may or may not be able to act consistently depending on the timing of the failure notification. I was mucking around in this code in the Open MPI prototype, and thought I would get the opinions of the group as I move forward. Thanks, Josh ------------------------------------ Joshua Hursey Postdoctoral Research Associate Oak Ridge National Laboratory http://users.nccs.gov/~jjhursey