This section discusses the rationale behind the proposed design that justifies the introduction of the Revoke operation. We take the perspective of the performance conscious MPI implementor, and analyze the unacceptable overhead resulting from requiring uniformity of failure knowledge.
We then present the issues that arise when this requirement is dropped, and the modus-operandi of the Revoke interface to resolve them. The proposed design does indeed permit minimal overhead on failure free performance, as has been illustrated by the implementation presented in [7]. A more general presentation of the ulfm interface can be found in [6].