Rusty, I think that Dick may have been asking for the other way around.
I agree that the above is a very bad idea, but what about a query
to ask if the present system is homogeneous?
An application could check this parameter and respond accordingly.
My thoughts on this:
a. Such a query exists in PVM and was placed there after
several users requested such a feature. It is useful, but...
b. This query really falls into the area of resource management/info
and we have already voted not to tackle RM stuff in MPI-2.
If we step back on the slippery slope of RM, we are backtracking.
Al Geist