[Mpi3-tools] MPI3 tools WG Mission Statement

[Martin Schulz]

On Sep 2, 2009, at 4:18 PM, Ashley Pittman wrote:

> 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.

The statement was supposed to be as inclusive as possible. If there
is a concern that this is not the case, we can also go up a level and
just talk about "development tools".

>
>> 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.

Sorry, I missed that in the original email - I don't think we should  
talk only
about 3rd party tools. In particular, the performance interface will be
first party.

Combining these two issues, what about the following intro text:

The goal of this working group is define interfaces that can be used by
software development tools (including, but not limited to, performance
measurements tools, debuggers, and correctness checkers) 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.

Martin



>
> Ashley,
>
> -- 
>
> Ashley Pittman, Bath, UK.
>
> Padb - A parallel job inspection tool for cluster computing
> http://*padb.pittman.org.uk
>
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_______________________________________________________________________
Martin Schulz, schulzm at llnl.gov, http://people.llnl.gov/schulzm
CASC @ Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Livermore, USA