[Mpi-forum] MPI user survey

[Jeff Squyres]

Forum -- here's the questions that I took down on Friday morning.   
Josh Hursey and I cleaned them up quite a bit, and we grabbed Bill  
Gropp for 5 minutes on Saturday to give us a bit of spot feedback.   
Here's the results.

*** Please send comments by Monday evening so that we can get these  
posted on a web site.  Thanks.

------------------------
x. Which of the following best describes you?
    - User of MPI applications
    - MPI application developer
    - MPI implementer
    - Academic educator, student, or researcher
    - Program / project management
    - Other ________________

x. Rate your familiarity with the MPI standard?
    - 1/not familiar at all ... 5/extremely familiar

x. Think of an MPI application that you run frequently.  What is the
    typical number of MPI processes per job that you run? (select all
    that apply)
    - 1-16 MPI processes
    - 17-64 MPI processes
    - 65-512 MPI processes
    - 513-2048 MPI processes
    - 2049 MPI processes or more
    - I don't know

x. Using the same MPI application from #3, what is the typical number
    of MPI processes that you run per node? (select all that apply)
    - 1 MPI process
    - 2-3 MPI processes
    - 4-7 MPI processes
    - 8-15 MPI processes
    - 16 MPI processes or more
    - I don't know

x. Using the same application from #3, is it a 32 or 64 bit application?
    (select all that apply)
    - 32 bit
    - 64 bit
    - I don't know
    - Other: _________________

x. Which of the following do your *any* of your MPI applications use?
     (select all that apply)
    - Threads
    - OpenMP
    - Shmem
    - Global Arrays
    - Co-processors / accelerators
    - PGAS languages
    - I don't know
    - Other: ______________

x. How important are each of the following sets of MPI functionality
to *any* of your MPI applications?
    1/not important at all ... 5/very important
    - Point-to-point communications
    - Collective communications
    - Derived / complex datatypes
    - Communicators other than MPI_COMM_WORLD
    - Graph or Cartesian process topologies
    - Error handles / error checking
    - Dynamic MPI processes (spawn, connect/accept, join)
    - One-sided communication
    - Generalized requests
    - Parallel I/O
    - "PMPI" profiling interface
    - Multi-threaded applications (for example, MPI_THREAD_MULTIPLE)
    - Other: ______________
    If you marked any set with 1 or 2, please explain why.
    __________

x. Are any of your MPI applications written to use the MPI C++
    bindings?
    - Yes
    - No
    - I don't know

x. I expect to be able to upgrade to an MPI-3 implementation and still
    be able to run my legacy MPI aplications *without recompiling*.
    Strongly agree/1 ...... Strongly disagree/5
    Open comment: _________________________

x. I expect to be able to upgrade to an MPI-3 implementation and only
     need to recompile my legacy MPI applications *with no source code
     changes*.
     Strongly agree/1 ....... Strongly disagree/5
     Open comment: _________________________

x. My MPI application would benefit from being able to reference more
    than 2^31 data items in a single MPI function invocation.
     Strongly agree/1 ....... Strongly disagree/5
     Open comment: _________________________

x. MPI one-sided communication performance is more important to me
     than supporting a rich remote memory access (RMA) feature set.
     Strongly agree/1 ....... Strongly disagree/5
     Open comment: _________________________

x. The following are a list of topics that the MPI Forum is
    considering for MPI-3.  Rank them in order of importance to your
    MPI applications:
    - Non-blocking collective communications
    - Revamped one-sided communications (compared to MPI-2.2)
    - MPI application control of fault tolerance
    - New Fortran bindings (type safety, etc.)
    - "Hybrid" programming (MPI in conjunction with threads, OpenMP, ..)
    - Standardized third-party MPI tool support
    - Other: ______________

x. What *ONE THING* would you like to see added or improved in the MPI
    standard?
    _____________

x. Rate the following in order of importance to your MPI applications:
    - Performance
    - Feature-rich API
    - Run-time reliability
    - Scalability to large numbers of MPI processes
    - Integration with other communication protocols /

x. Did you attend the MPI Forum BOF at SC09?
    - Yes
    - No

x. Use the space below to provide any other information, suggestions,
     or comments to the MPI Forum.
     ________________________


-- 
Jeff Squyres
jsquyres at cisco.com