[Mpi3-tools] MPI3 tools WG Mission Statement

[Martin Schulz]

Hi all,

Below is a first draft of a mission statement for the tools WG that we  
were asked to
provide. I would like to discuss this with the whole group at  
tomorrow's WG meeting.
Please feel free to also comment via email if you can't make it to the  
meeting or
if have any urgent comments (seems the MPI Forum seems to be reviewing  
some
of these already).

Thanks,

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.

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.


_______________________________________________________________________
Martin Schulz, schulzm at llnl.gov, http://people.llnl.gov/schulzm
CASC @ Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Livermore, USA