itaps-parallel Question for Harold

[Devine, Karen D]

Hi, Harold.

The ITAPS Parallel Interface subcommittee has a question for you.

We have defined partitions to be assignments of entities to subsets, and
parts to be those subsets.  We assume that a mesh instance may have several
partitions, but a partition contains entities from only one mesh instance.
We also assume a processor may have many parts, but each part is contained
completely within only one processor.

We identify partitions with a (mesh instance, partition handle) pair.  That
is, functions that operate on partitions would take a mesh instance and a
partition handle as input arguments.

Similarly, within a processor, we would like to identify parts with a (mesh
instance, part handle) pair so that we can overload many of the iMesh
EntitySet functions with part handles.  That is, we would like to allow,
say, iMesh_getNumOfType to accept either an entity set handle OR a part
handle, and return the number of entities of a given type in the entity set
or the part, respectively.  There was some concern, however, that (1) some
implementations may not be able to distinguish between part and entity set
handles, and (2) some implementations might not be able to uniquely identify
parts given only the mesh instance and part handle (e.g., they might also
need the partition handle).

The alternative to overloading the EntitySet argument is to define many new
interface functions that take the mesh instance, partition handle, and part
handle as input and duplicate the EntitySet functionality on parts.

Within the subcommittee, we agreed that we could accept the (mesh instance,
part handle) pair only if your implementations could support it.  So, you
wield the power now.  :)  Would the (mesh instance, part handle) pair be
sufficient for uniquely identify parts on a processor?

Thanks.
Karen