new external chapter done

Steve Huss-Lederman (lederman@cs.wisc.edu)
Sat, 19 Oct 1996 15:04:00 -0500

The document just released to the forum contains the new external
interfaces information. It can be found in the external interfaces
chapter and the JOD chapter on caching. In case you didn't get the
message to the full forum it can be gotten at
http://www.cs.wisc.edu/~lederman/mpi2/mpi2-report.ps.Z and
ftp://ftp.cs.wisc.edu/pub/lederman/mpi2/mpi2-report.ps.Z. (Note: This
is not where the chapter releases have occurred.)

Here is the list of change items that is at the start of the chapter.
Not that a LOT of things changed. I encourage each of you to read
the text since this is the last shot before the SC'96 release.

o Communicator ID section removed

o Determining Contiguous Datatypes section removed

o Caching on additional handles has been moved to JOD. The text
describing the new MPI_Handle_type} has been moved to misc.

o Callbacks at process termination was updated and then moved to
misc.

o The introduction has been rewritten.

o The section on generalized requests has been reworked to a major
extent. There is now a progress callback function. Also, the
requests can be blocking, non-blocking, and persistent. Generalized
requests are now the same handle type as other requests.

o Placing information in status was redone.

o Naming was limited to communicators and predefined comms have
predefined names.

o New proposal for User Error Codes.

o Name change to low level datatype accessing functions to add
GET. Also raise some questions we need to settle.

o The pack/unpack of datatype and communicators section has been
replaced with a new section that uses new functions.

o The previous canonical datatype representation sections have been
replaced with a new section.

o The threads sections got some work. It needs more discussion
and work to do it justice.

Thanks,
Steve