Hi Martin,

The goal of this working group is define interfaces that can be used by both performance and correctness tools 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.

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). 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. These interfaces are complementary to the existing 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.

In particular, this WG is aiming at the standardization of the following interfaces: - A scalable version of a process acquisition interface to identify and locate all processes which are part of an MPI job. - An interface to look for and locate tool DLLs. - An interface to inspect message queues. - An interface to understand progress in collective communication. - An interface to query additional semantic information for opaque MPI handles. - A performance information interface that allows MPI implementations to export additional low level performance information including, but not limited to, the operating state of the MPI library.

The time frame that was discussed today for the MPI 3.x effort was 3+1 years. That is 3 years until 3.0 is ready, and an additional year for something like 3.1 (Jeff, feel free to correct me on this). I don't have the experience yet, to estimate whether it is doable in this time frame, but the list seems to be quite long. All the items on the list seems valid points of interest, though. Best regards, Marc-Andre -- Marc-Andre Hermanns Juelich Supercomputing Centre Institute for Advanced Simulation Forschungszentrum Juelich GmbH D-52425 Juelich Germany Phone : +49-2461-61-2054 Fax : +49-2461-61-6656 eMail : [email protected] WWW : http://www.fz-juelich.de/jsc/ JSC is the coordinator of the John von Neumann Institute for Computing and member of the Gauss Centre for Supercomputing Sitz der Gesellschaft: Juelich Eingetragen im Handelsregister des Amtsgerichts Dueren Nr. HR B 3498 Vorsitzende des Aufsichtsrats: MinDir'in Baerbel Brumme-Bothe Geschaeftsfuehrung: Prof. Dr. Achim Bachem (Vorsitzender), Dr. Ulrich Krafft (stellv. Vorsitzender), Prof. Dr. Harald Bolt, Prof. Dr. Sebastian M. Schmidt