Accordingly, there are new APIs to the name service to support the ability to get a job's parent, root, immediate children, and all its descendants. In addition, the terminate_job, terminate_orted, and signal_job APIs for the PLS have been modified to accept attributes that define the extent of their actions. For example, doing a "terminate_job" with an attribute of ORTE_NS_INCLUDE_DESCENDANTS will terminate the given jobid AND all jobs that descended from it.
I have tested this capability on a MacBook under rsh, Odin under SLURM, and LANL's Flash (bproc). It worked successfully on non-MPI jobs (both simple and including a spawn), and MPI jobs (again, both simple and with a spawn).
This commit was SVN r12597.