Subject: data representation

From: [email-masked] (Rolf Hempel)
Date: Wed, 22 Jun 1994 15:56:13 +0200

Hi folks,

during our work on an automatic PARMACS-->MPI translator the following
question came up: how can an MPI-process find out whether another
process runs on a processor with the same data representation or not?
In the first case I can just send a PARMACS buffer as type MPI_BYTE
without bothering about its contents, whereas in the second case I
have to do something special for every segment of the message. (A
message segment contains data of one type only.) For performance
reasons I don't want to go the second way in the 95% of cases where the
representations match.

I hoped for finding an inquiry function in the Environmental Management
section. The function MPI_GET PROCESSOR_NAME does not help, because
it gives different strings for different processors, not for different
types of processors.

Any brilliant idea? The only obvious way seems to be to send a test
message and look if the received message matches the original. However,
this method is not very precise, and complicated to use.

- Rolf

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