Newsgroups: comp.parallel.mpi
From: kohr@donner.mcs.anl.gov (Dave Kohr)
Subject: Re: Inter-program communication
Organization: MCS, Argonne National Laboratory
Date: Fri, 27 Sep 1996 19:44:8 GMT
Message-ID: <84385344818585@donner.mcs.anl.gov>

In article <324BA4EC.41C6@abingdon.geoquest.slb.com>,
Jon Eva  <jeva@abingdon.geoquest.slb.com> wrote:
>What I want to do is fairly simple, but I've been poring over the MPI
>manuals for days now without getting anywhere so I thought I'd ask this
>group.

Which MPI manuals?  There are many different implementations, each with
their own documentation.

>Basically I have two completely separate programs that need to
>communicate. In PVM this can be achieved by spawning one from the
>other, which I know MPI can't do.
>
>As far as I can see the only way for me to do this in MPI is to merge
>the programs into one huge great unwieldy executable

Most MPI implementations I'm familiar with have some sort of support for
combining different executables into a single MPI computation.  Generally
you can specify things like "I want the process with rank 0 to run on host
H0 with executable E0, and the process with rank 1 to run on host H1 with
executable E1".  This should do precisely what you want.

This feature is not mandated by the MPI standard, it's just a widely
implemented extension.

Dave Kohr    Hacker/Researcher    Argonne National Laboratory, MCS Division
Building 203, Room C-246   Phone: (630) 252-4243   E-mail: kohr@mcs.anl.gov
See also my WWW Home Page:      http://www.mcs.anl.gov/home/kohr/index.html
                      "Surfing the Silicon Prairie."

