[Mpi-forum] Follow up from the Jan meeting of the Forum

[Graham, Richard L.]

Attendance at this last meeting was lower than normal, so I am following up with an e-mail message to let people know the crux of several key discussions that took place.

First, the goal is to have finished this round of meeting of the MPI Forum by the end of calendar year 2011, and to release a single standard document at the end of the process, with no other formal release of the standard between now and then.  That will be MPI 3.0.  With this in mind, we are leaning towards releasing draft versions of the standard, as new sections are voted in.  These will have the nature that they we don't expect them to change (otherwise why would we vote them in), but could change before the standard is finalized.  These will be snap shots of the document repository as it stands at the end of a given meeting, or a few days after that.  The expectation is that as soon as the nonblocking collectives are integrated into the document, and we go through a vote on this integration, we will release the first draft standard.

To bring focus on individual items being discussed, and to let people know in advance what our plans are, we will start to focus on individual areas in future meetings.  There will be on the order of eight hours of meeting time, either/or working group and plenary session, devoted to these topics.  The current plan  is

March 8-10, 2010: RMA and Tools (first draft of an agenda will come out in the next week or so)
May 3-5, 2010: Hybrid Programming  and Backward Compatibility
June 14-16: Fault Tolerance (async process control and piggy backing) and Fortran
Sept 16-18: Fault Tolerance (failure recovery) and TBD
Oct 11-13: TBD
Dec 6-8: TBD

We will finish filling out these details over time.  The expectation is that for most of these items (not all) a first draft of text will be available within two meetings (if the decision is to move forward), which will kick off the formal process of standardization.   For all but the RMA working group, where the time in the March meeting will formally be working group time, the expectation is that these discussions will be accompanied with working prototype code.

This does not mean that the forum will not consider new items, but the window for considering such items is rapidly closing.

As usual, comments back are welcome,
Rich