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.

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. Ashley, -- Ashley Pittman, Bath, UK. Padb - A parallel job inspection tool for cluster computing http://padb.pittman.org.uk