Let me start the e-mail conversation, and see how far we get. Goal: The goal several of us have is to be able to use the btl¹s outside of the MPI layer in Open MPI. The layer itself is generic, w/o specific knowledge of Upper Level Protocols, so is well suited for this sort of use.
Technical Approach: What we have suggested is to start the process with the Open MPI code base, and make it independent of the mpi-layer (which it is now), and the run-time layer. Before we get into any specific technical details, the first question I have is are people totally opposed to the notion of making the btl¹s independent of MPI and the run-time ? This does not mean that it can¹t be used by it, but that there are well defined abstraction layers, i.e., are people against the goal in the first place ? What are alternative suggestions to the technical approach ? One suggestion has been to branch and patch. To me this is a long-term maintenance nightmare. What are peoples thoughts here ? Rich
