Signals and MPI

When running the MPI library over TCP, nonfatal SIGPIPE signals may be generated. To handle them, the library sets the signal handler for SIGPIPE to ignore, overriding the default setting (terminate the process). In this way, the MPI library can recover in certain situations. You should therefore avoid changing the SIGPIPE signal handler.

The Sun MPI 4.0 Fortran and C⁺⁺ bindings are implemented as wrappers on top of the C bindings. The profiling interface is implemented using weak symbols. This means a profiling library need contain only a profiled version of C bindings.

The SIGPIPEs may occur when a process first starts communicating over TCP. This happens because the MPI library creates connections over TCP only when processes actually communicate with one another. There are some unavoidable conditions where SIGPIPEs may be generated when two processes establish a connection. If you want to avoid any SIGPIPEs, set the environment variable MPI_FULLCONNINIT, which creates all connections during MPI_Init() and avoids any situations which may generate a SIGPIPE. For more information about environment variables, see the Sun MPI user's guides.