It really irks me that we can't use the various partitioners in our nightly tests because they use rand() and produce different results on different machines. Here is what I propose 1) add ./configure flag --with-petsc-rand 2) if the flag is set then provide our own rand() and srand() (by crudely wrapping PetscRandom()) in pinit.c which is compiled if the flag is set 3) add the --with-petsc-rand to all the nightlybuilds Problems with this plan? Barry