I saw this sentence in the proposal: \MPI/ guarantees that eventually all processes in the \MPI/ universe will become aware of all process failures. I think we only want to say all processes will become aware of all failures of _connected_ processes. Two MPI jobs can technically belong to the same universe, but they don't need to be aware of each other's failures unless they're connected. Besides, unless they were connected, there would be no way to identify the failed processes of one job to the processes of the other job. As an aside, I did some grepping for "universe" in the standard, and found that universe is actually not well defined. It can refer to communication within a communicator (p29), an implementation defined scope of a port name (p320) and an implementation defined set of processes that can communicate with each other. Then there's MPI_UNIVERSE_SIZE which is the number of total processes that "can usefully be started," (p308) which implies the definition of universe that I think most people use, namely, the set of all potential processes that some process can be made aware of / be connected to. -d