[MPI3 Fortran] Non-contiguous arrays (was Re: Argument data sizes)

[Aleksandar Donev]

On Thursday 18 September 2008 10:28, Iain Bason wrote:

> Didn't this come up in another thread?
Yes :-)
> In Fortran, you can use   
> assumed shape arrays to pass these sorts of data without copying.  It  
> would be nice if MPI could take advantage of that in order to make  
> life easier for Fortran programmers.
It can, after we publish the Interop TR currently being worked on by J3. It 
would allow for declarations such as:

TYPE(*), DIMENSION(..) :: buffer

which would pass an array descriptor for buffer that can then be parsed even 
by third-party libraries and a copy avoided. This would, however, as Jeff 
said, be new *functionality* that we would be adding on top of the base MPI 
standard. As such, it should probably be in addition or on top of the basic 
Fortran binding which merely translates the MPI standard.

Best,
Aleks