Features Needed to Support Libraries
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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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