Hi, 

I guess i need to be asking more specific questions. 

I saw the same issue has been raised a few years ago and apparently there was no solution for it back then, so i thought i'd check again. 

The question is about bypassing mpiexec and trying to connect already running processes (which already have some data in memory to share with mpi tasks) into a single communicator without having to spawn yet another process with mpiexec.

Suppose one of this processes uses MPI_Comm_accept, and the other somehow know the mpi port name and would use MPI_Comm_connect() to connect to it.

Everything works as long as both server and client started with mpiexec -n 1. However, without mpiexec, the same attempts cause errors and connection never happens: 

mpiexec@Intel-Kubu] match_arg (utils/args/args.c:159): unrecognized argument pmi_args
[mpiexec@Intel-Kubu] HYDU_parse_array (utils/args/args.c:174): argument matching returned error
[mpiexec@Intel-Kubu] parse_args (ui/mpich/utils.c:1596): error parsing input array
[mpiexec@Intel-Kubu] HYD_uii_mpx_get_parameters (ui/mpich/utils.c:1648): unable to parse user arguments
[mpiexec@Intel-Kubu] main (ui/mpich/mpiexec.c:153): error parsing parameters


So, there's no way of working around the necessity to spawn an entirely new process with mpiexec?

Thank you very much for your help. 
-Dmitriy