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The key features needed to support
the creation of robust parallel libraries are as follows:
- Safe communication space, that guarantees that
libraries can communicate as they need to, without conflicting with
communication extraneous to the library,
- Group scope for collective operations, that allow
libraries to avoid unnecessarily synchronizing uninvolved
processes (potentially running unrelated code),
- Abstract process naming to allow libraries to describe
their communication in terms suitable to their own data
structures and algorithms,
- The ability to ``adorn'' a set of communicating processes with
additional user-defined attributes, such as extra collective
operations. This mechanism should provide a means for the
user or library writer effectively to extend a message-passing
notation.
In addition, a unified mechanism or object is needed for conveniently denoting
communication context, the group of communicating processes, to house abstract
process naming, and to store adornments.
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