\section{Package Overview }
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The Message Passing Envionment Utility ({\tt mpeu}) is a library that
was designed and developed at the Data Assimilation Office (DAO) to
support its data assimilation system.
It sits on top of vendors utilities such as MPI, BLAS, shared-memory
primitives, etc. 
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{\tt mpeu} is written is Fortran 90 and is portable to many platforms.
It provides the following services:
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\begin{itemize}
\item Management of resources
\item Manipulation of strings
\item F90 module-style access to MPI
\item Portable/flexible definition of types
\item Support for multiprocessor stdout/stderr
\item Error handling/shutdown
\item Timing/load balance monitoring tools
\item Sorting tools
\end{itemize}
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The {\tt mpeu} library can be easily included in any application (using
MPI) and can be ported into any platform with little (or no) modification.

This report is a user's documentation that describes the above {\tt mpeu}
services.
Each of the services is contained a module. 
In the next sections, we present the functions of each module and provides 
enough examples to show how the library can be efficiently employed in a 
given application.
