Note that the Test Manager itself knows very little about the test scripts and what they are designed to test. All of this information will be encoded in the test scripts. These scripts are interpreted on all of the MPI processes including the Test Manager's simulated MPI processes.
On the NIST Web server, which runs the Test Manager, each test script will be stored as a single ASCII file. During testing, these scripts are read from the disk and sent to each of the MPI processes as input to the interpreter. The Test Manager maintains a queue of requested tests and, in order to meet the configuration requirements of the requested tests, it may prompt the tester as needed to restart the interpreter on the SUT. The interpreter must be restarted each time a set of tests is to be run which requires a different configuration of processes than the current configuration.
The Test Manager's version of the test script interpreter includes support subroutines, like report(), which accepts messages (text strings) from the simulated MPI processes and sends these messages on to the Test Tool applet for display, so that the tester can monitor the progress of the tests.