MPI point-to-point communication routines generally have an argument list that takes one of the following formats:
Program (application) address space that references the data that is to be sent or received. In most cases, this is simply the variable name that is be sent/received. For C programs, this argument is passed by reference and usually must be prepended with an ampersand: &var1
Indicates the number of data elements of a particular type to be sent.
For reasons of portability, MPI predefines its elementary data types. The table below lists those required by the standard.
Notes:
An argument to send routines that indicates the process where a message should be delivered. Specified as the rank of the receiving process.
An argument to receive routines that indicates the originating process of the message. Specified as the rank of the sending process. This may be set to the wild card MPI_ANY_SOURCE to receive a message from any task.
Arbitrary non-negative integer assigned by the programmer to uniquely identify a message. Send and receive operations should match message tags. For a receive operation, the wild card MPI_ANY_TAG can be used to receive any message regardless of its tag. The MPI standard guarantees that integers 0-32767 can be used as tags, but most implementations allow a much larger range than this.
Indicates the communication context, or set of processes for which the source or destination fields are valid. Unless the programmer is explicitly creating new communicators, the predefined communicator MPI_COMM_WORLD is usually used.
For a receive operation, indicates the source of the message and the tag of the message. In C, this argument is a pointer to a predefined structure MPI_Status (ex. stat.MPI_SOURCE stat.MPI_TAG). In Fortran, it is an integer array of size MPI_STATUS_SIZE (ex. stat(MPI_SOURCE) stat(MPI_TAG)). Additionally, the actual number of bytes received is obtainable from Status via the MPI_Get_count routine. The constants MPI_STATUS_IGNORE and MPI_STATUSES_IGNORE can be substituted if a message’s source, tag or size will be be queried later.
Used by non-blocking send and receive operations. Since non-blocking operations may return before the requested system buffer space is obtained, the system issues a unique “request number”. The programmer uses this system assigned “handle” later (in a WAIT type routine) to determine completion of the non-blocking operation. In C, this argument is a pointer to a predefined structure MPI_Request. In Fortran, it is an integer.