Multiple Levels of Interception



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Multiple Levels of Interception

The scheme given here does not directly support the nesting of profiling functions, since it provides only a single alternative name for each MPI function. The MPI Forum gave consideration to an implementation which would allow multiple levels of call interception; however, it was unable to construct an implementation of this which did not have the following disadvantages

o assuring a particular implementation language.
o imposing a run time cost when no profiling was taking place. 
Since one of the objectives of MPI is to permit efficient, low latency implementations, and it is not the business of a standard to require a particular implementation language, the MPI Forum decided to accept the scheme outlined above.

Note, however, that it is possible to use the scheme above to implement a multi-level system, since the function called by the user may call many different profiling functions before calling the underlying MPI function.

Unfortunately such an implementation may require more cooperation between the different profiling libraries than is required for the single level implementation detailed above.



Jack Dongarra
Fri Sep 1 06:16:55 EDT 1995