On Sep 2, 2009, at 4:18 PM, Ashley Pittman wrote:

On Wed, 2009-09-02 at 21:46 +0300, Marc-Andre Hermanns wrote:

...

Does 'correctness' tools include debuggers? It immediately triggered things like "Marmot" and not directly Totalview, DDT, etc., as I would usually not refer to a debugger as a correctness checker (but then, I am not a native speaker).

That was my first thought when I read the text as well, there are a multitude of tools out there and no doubt there will me more which are not even thought of yet during the lifetime of the interfaces we are specifying.

The statement was supposed to be as inclusive as possible. If there is a concern that this is not the case, we can also go up a level and just talk about "development tools".

...

To make that a little clearer I would propose the following change:

The goal of this working group is to define interfaces that can be used by third party tools to obtain internal information about the MPI library, as well as the system environment an MPI application runs in. These tools include performance analysis tools, correctness checkers and debuggers.

Is "third party" or "external" better here? Saying something is "third party" to a specification seems a little unusual to me, it would be third party to the vendor who implements the spec whereas external could equally well apply to the forum, specification or vendor.

Sorry, I missed that in the original email - I don't think we should talk only about 3rd party tools. In particular, the performance interface will be first party. Combining these two issues, what about the following intro text: The goal of this working group is define interfaces that can be used by software development tools (including, but not limited to, performance measurements tools, debuggers, and correctness checkers) to gain information about internals of the MPI library, interactions between an application and the MPI library, as well as the system environment an MPI application runs in. This is intended as an extension to the existing and widely used PMPI interface. These efforts will help in providing reliable and portable interfaces for MPI tools with new functionality currently not covered by the MPI standard. Martin

Ashley,

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Ashley Pittman, Bath, UK.

Padb - A parallel job inspection tool for cluster computing http://*padb.pittman.org.uk

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