New wording based on comments during the call. -d MPI_GROUP_VALIDATE is a process local operation that takes a snapshot of the local list of known failed processes for the specified process group. If any new failures were added to the local list (either since the group was created or the last call to MPI_GROUP_VALIDATE), then newfailures will be set to true, otherwise it will be set to false. The following accessor functions are used to query the snapshot of the local known failed processes taken with MPI_GROUP_VALIDATE. Note the snapshot only change when MPI_GROUP_VALIDATE is called. This means that queries of the state of a process using the following accessor functions will always return the same value until MPI_GROUP_VALIDATE is called again. Rationale. The constant state requirement between calls MPI_GROUP_VALIDATE and similar update validation operations allows the application to manage thread safety while querying the snapshot of local list of processes (maintained by the MPI implementation). (End of rationale.)