NAME

MPI_Bcast - Broadcasts a message from the process with rank "root" to all other processes of the group.

SYNOPSIS

#include <mpi.h>
int MPI_Bcast(void *buff, int count, MPI_Datatype datatype, 


              int root, MPI_Comm comm)

INPUT/OUTPUT PARAMETERS

buff

- starting address of buffer (choice)

count

- number of entries in buffer (integer)

datatype

- data type of buffer (handle)

root

- rank of broadcast root (integer)

comm

- communicator (handle)

USAGE WITH IMPI EXTENSIONS

This function has had the IMPI extensions implemented. It is legal to call this function on IMPI communicators.

ALGORITHM

For 4 or less ranks, a linear algorithm is used, where rank 0 loops over sending the message to each other rank.

If more than 4 ranks are involved, a tree-based algorithm is used to send the messages from rank 0.

NOTES FOR FORTRAN

All MPI routines in Fortran (except for MPI_WTIME and MPI_WTICK ) have an additional argument ierr at the end of the argument list. ierr is an integer and has the same meaning as the return value of the routine in C. In Fortran, MPI routines are subroutines, and are invoked with the call statement.

All MPI objects (e.g., MPI_Datatype , MPI_Comm ) are of type INTEGER in Fortran.

ERRORS

If an error occurs in an MPI function, the current MPI error handler is called to handle it. By default, this error handler aborts the MPI job. The error handler may be changed with MPI_Errhandler_set ; the predefined error handler MPI_ERRORS_RETURN may be used to cause error values to be returned (in C and Fortran; this error handler is less useful in with the C++ MPI bindings. The predefined error handler MPI::ERRORS_THROW_EXCEPTIONS should be used in C++ if the error value needs to be recovered). Note that MPI does not guarantee that an MPI program can continue past an error.

All MPI routines (except MPI_Wtime and MPI_Wtick ) return an error value; C routines as the value of the function and Fortran routines in the last argument. The C++ bindings for MPI do not return error values; instead, error values are communicated by throwing exceptions of type MPI::Exception (but not by default). Exceptions are only thrown if the error value is not MPI::SUCCESS .

Note that if the MPI::ERRORS_RETURN handler is set in C++, while MPI functions will return upon an error, there will be no way to recover what the actual error value was.

MPI_SUCCESS

- No error; MPI routine completed successfully.

MPI_ERR_COMM

- Invalid communicator. A common error is to use a null communicator in a call (not even allowed in MPI_Comm_rank ).

MPI_ERR_OTHER

- A collective implementation was not able to be located at run-time for this communicator.

MPI_ERR_COUNT

- Invalid count argument. Count arguments must be non-negative; a count of zero is often valid.

MPI_ERR_TYPE

- Invalid datatype argument. May be an uncommitted MPI_Datatype (see MPI_Type_commit ).

MPI_ERR_BUFFER

- Invalid buffer pointer. Usually a null buffer where one is not valid.

MPI_ERR_ROOT

- Invalid root. The root must be specified as a rank in the communicator. Ranks must be between zero and the size of the communicator minus one.

MORE INFORMATION

For more information, please see the official MPI Forum web site, which contains the text of both the MPI-1 and MPI-2 standards. These documents contain detailed information about each MPI function (most of which is not duplicated in these man pages).

http://www.mpi-forum.org/

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The LAM Team would like the thank the MPICH Team for the handy program to generate man pages ("doctext" from ftp://ftp.mcs.anl.gov/pub/sowing/sowing.tar.gz ), the initial formatting, and some initial text for most of the MPI-1 man pages.

LOCATION

bcast.c