Probably we should not try to define this, and encourage checkpoint/restart people work with particular MPI implementations to make sure things work? After all, it's not about an abstract MPI and abstract CR system - there will probably always be actual pairs (or other relationships) of them that can work together.
Compare this to the situation with threads. MPI acknowledges their existence and provide a couple of calls to request a particular level of support, that's all. This was good enough for starters, and may change in the future. The relation between MPI and CR may go this way, too: acknowledging first, integrating next.
If all that you want to add to the spec is a couple of calls to say that MPI state should be frozen in some sense, that's fine with me since we're defining what these calls do. However, I'm not sure that the wider forum will accept them because there is a general dislike for adding more calls and the primary value of these calls is to motivate people to provide implementation-specific definitions for them, which I'm guessing is lower than the standard bar for acceptance. Greg Bronevetsky Post-Doctoral Researcher 1028 Building 451 Lawrence Livermore National Lab (925) 424-5756 [email protected]