Inside the Message Passing Interface

Chapter 4 Extensions

In this chapter you will learn how to add essential MPI features including basic communicator management, elementary datatypes, selected collective operations, proper error handling, and Fortran language binding.

Some of these features will be almost trivial in implementation and usage, some will require substantial effort both in understanding and in design. Combined with the material of Chapter 5, this MPI subset will be as close to the Real Thing as one can get without spending years on development. Moreover, in this chapter, in accordance with the 10/90 principle, we will focus on the most essential features of the MPI standard and tune out the remaining and less popular features (like one-sided operations, file I/O, ...