SHMEM_FINALIZE(3)

💖 SHMEM_FINALIZE 💖

okay bestie, gather round, because this is the shmem_finalize page from the Open MPI manual (section 3, the library calls, iykyk) and it's lowkey the most important goodbye in your whole OpenSHMEM era 🫶

shmem_finalize — a collective operation that releases the resources the OpenSHMEM library was hogging. the tea? it only ends the OpenSHMEM portion of your program. not the whole program. we are NOT shutting down the entire vibe, just the shmem part 💅

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✨ SYNOPSIS ✨

C or C++:

#include <mpp/shmem.h>

void shmem_finalize(void)

Fortran:

include 'mpp/shmem.fh'
CALL SHMEM_FINALIZE

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🌸 DESCRIPTION 🌸

so shmem_finalize is a collective operation that ends the OpenSHMEM portion of a program that was previously initialized by shmem_init <#shmem-init>, and it releases all the resources the OpenSHMEM library was using. it literally says goodbye and cleans up her room before she leaves 🧹✨

because it's collective, every single PE has to participate in the call. no lurking, no skipping, no "brb one sec". all PEs, or it's not happening, fr fr.

there's an implicit global barrier baked into shmem_finalize — that's there so any pending communication actually finishes, and no resources get released until every PE has entered shmem_finalize. the way that nothing can be freed until the whole group is present? iconic. periodt. 👑

technical caveat, and it is NOT optional: shmem_finalize must be the last OpenSHMEM library call encountered in the OpenSHMEM portion of a program. like, the last one. final. no more calls after. don't test it 😭

a call to shmem_finalize releases any resources that were initialized by the corresponding call to shmem_init <#shmem-init>.

and here's the part people get confused about: all the processes and threads that represent the PEs will still exist after shmem_finalize returns — they do not vanish — but they will no longer have access to any of the resources that have been released. so like, they're still standing there, but the OpenSHMEM resources are gone gone. 💀

👀 See also:

• intro_shmem(3)
• shmem_my_pe(3)
• shmem_init(3)

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Copyright 2003-2026, The Open MPI Community 🫶

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and that's the whole page bestie, slay 💖 this was the Open MPI version of SHMEM_FINALIZE(3), dated Sep 10, 2026, and you absolutely ate by reading the whole thing. go finalize responsibly. mwah 🎀🌈⭐