Patent US 6,865,741

A message processing facility provides a send function for sending messages to designated locations. The facility allows a default target for a message, initiates parallel execution, adds additional processes to an already parallel execution, determines that a problem has completed and performs the appropriate completion actions. The message processing facility enables coordination of the results of a network that has been widened in its parallelism, without creating subproblems. Processes within the parallel network do not need to be aware of the topology or the position of a given process within the topology. The width of the parallelism involved in a particular request is tracked, and therefore, the appropriate number of results expected can be determined automatically and dynamically. Therefore, despite dynamic changes in topology, completion can be determined without awareness of the processes that create the results.