The little-known “vacation” MPI function allows one to suspend the calling MPI process for brief periods of time.  The return value is an array of events that were missed while the process was inactive.  Note that the “duration” parameter is constrained to be a short value.

Programmers should also note that the returned array size tends to be large (typically regardless of the duration parameter value).  Care should be taken to ensure that enough resources are dedicated to to processing the pending events while also responding to new events in a timely manner.

This is my way of saying, “I’m back from vacation — regularly-scheduled blog postings will now resume.”