Operational Details



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Operational Details

A collective operation is executed by having all processes in the group call the communication routine, with matching arguments. The syntax and semantics of the collective operations are defined to be consistent with the syntax and semantics of the point-to-point operations. Thus, user-defined datatypes are allowed and must match between sending and receiving processes as specified in Chapter gif. One of the key arguments is an intracommunicator that defines the group of participating processes and provides a communication domain for the operation. In calls where a root process is defined, some arguments are specified as ``significant only at root,'' and are ignored for all participants except the root. The reader is referred to Chapter gif for information concerning communication buffers and type matching rules, to Chapter gif for user-defined datatypes, and to Chapter gif for information on how to define groups and create communicators.

The type-matching conditions for the collective operations are more strict than the corresponding conditions between sender and receiver in point-to-point. Namely, for collective operations, the amount of data sent must exactly match the amount of data specified by the receiver. Distinct type maps (the layout in memory, see Section gif) between sender and receiver are still allowed. type matchingcollective, and type matching

Collective communication calls may use the same communicators as point-to-point communication; MPI guarantees that messages generated on behalf of collective communication calls will not be confused with messages generated by point-to-point communication. A more detailed discussion of correct use of collective routines is found in Section gif.



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