The objective of the MPI profiling interface is to ensure that it is relatively easy for authors of profiling (and other similar) tools to interface their codes to MPI implementations on different machines.
Since MPI is a machine independent standard with many different implementations, it is unreasonable to expect that the authors of profiling tools for MPI will have access to the source code that implements MPI on any particular machine. It is therefore necessary to provide a mechanism by which the implementors of such tools can collect whatever performance information they wish without access to the underlying implementation.
We believe that having such an interface is important if MPI is to be attractive to end users, since the availability of many different tools will be a significant factor in attracting users to the MPI standard.
The profiling interface is just that, an interface. It says nothing about the way in which it is used. There is therefore no attempt to lay down what information is collected through the interface, or how the collected information is saved, filtered, or displayed.
While the initial impetus for the development of this interface arose from the desire to permit the implementation of profiling tools, it is clear that an interface like that specified may also prove useful for other purposes, such as ``internetworking'' multiple MPI implementations. Since all that is defined is an interface, there is no objection to its being used wherever it is useful.
As the issues being addressed here are intimately tied up with the way in which executable images are built, which may differ greatly on different machines, the examples given below should be treated solely as one way of implementing the objective of the MPI profiling interface. The actual requirements made of an implementation are those detailed in the Requirements section above, the whole of the rest of this section is only present as justification and discussion of the logic for those requirements.
The examples below show one way in which an implementation could be constructed to meet the requirements on a Unix system (there are doubtless others that would be equally valid).