Month: July 2014

A question about uniformly creating an inter-communicator using MPI_Intercomm_create has been posted on the ULFM mailing list. Initially, I though it is an easy corner-case, that can be solved with few barriers and/or agreements. It turns out this issue is more complicated that initially expected, with few twists on the way. Let me detail our adventure toward writing a uniform intercomm creation function. Before moving further, let’s clarify what MPI_Intercomm_create is about. The MPI standard is not very explicit about the scope of this function, but we can gather enough info to start talking about (page 262 line 6): This call [MPI_Intercomm_create] creates an inter-communicator. It is collective over the union of the local and remote groups. Processes should provide identical local_comm and local_leader arguments within each group. Wildcards are not permitted for remote_leader, local_leader, and tag. In other words, if you provide two intra-communicators, a leader on each one and a bridge communicator where the leaders can talk together, you will be able to bind the two groups of processes corresponding to each of the intra-communicators into a inter-communicator. Neat! Graphically speaking this should look like So far so good, but what “uniformly” means? Based on some Continue reading Uniform Intercomm Creation→