All processes in both groups identified by the intercommunicator must call the collective routine. In addition, processes in the same group must call the routine with matching arguments.
Note that the ``in place'' option for intracommunicators does not apply to intercommunicators since in the intercommunicator case there is no communication from a process to itself.
For intercommunicator collective communication, if the operation is rooted (e.g., broadcast, gather, scatter), then the transfer is unidirectional. The direction of the transfer is indicated by a special value of the root argument. In this case, for the group containing the root process, all processes in the group must call the routine using a special argument for the root. For this, the root process uses the special root value MPI_ROOT; all other processes in the same group as the root use MPI_PROC_NULL. All processes in the other group (the group that is the remote group relative to the root process) must call the collective routine and provide the rank of the root. If the operation is unrooted (e.g., alltoall), then the transfer is bidirectional.
Rationale.
Rooted operations are unidirectional by nature, and there is a clear
way of specifying direction. Non-rooted operations, such as
all-to-all, will often occur as part of an exchange, where it makes
sense to communicate in both directions at once.
( End of rationale.)