[Mpi-forum] why (int)0x4c000101 ?

[Jeff Hammond]

The values appear to be designed to be decoded quickly using e.g.
bitmasks.  Comparing a general character string to "char" is expensive
relative to a bitmask.  Just write write a C code to that compares
strncmp/strcmp to |/& and you'll see this clearly.

One will observe that information appears to be coded in those values.
You see that the third-to-last hex-digit indicates the number of bytes
in the type, with the exception of long double, which uses c=12 when
the type is actually 16 bytes.  I don't know why this is, but it
doesn't really matter since there is only one built-in type of this
size.  Inspecting the first- and second-to-list hex-digits indicates
that signed and unsigned types often (but not always) differ by only
one bit.

I didn't write that code but it is clear that the author was concerned
about performance, not human readability, although the scheme is
clearly not random, so I suspect it is quite readable to the MPICH2
developers.

You can look at OpenMPI for a different perspective on implementing these types:

#define OMPI_PREDEFINED_GLOBAL(type, global) ((type) ((void *) &(global)))
OMPI_DECLSPEC extern struct ompi_predefined_datatype_t ompi_mpi_char;
#define MPI_CHAR OMPI_PREDEFINED_GLOBAL(MPI_Datatype, ompi_mpi_char)

You'll have to look at the source if you want more information.  I
know very little about the internal design of OpenMPI.

Best,

Jeff

On Sun, May 27, 2012 at 9:42 AM, ÄþÄþ ¶­ <dncdd at yahoo.com.cn> wrote:
>
> when I read mpich2-1.4.1 code, I saw code as follow:
>
> typedef int MPI_Datatype;
> #define MPI_CHAR           ((MPI_Datatype)0x4c000101)
> #define MPI_SIGNED_CHAR    ((MPI_Datatype)0x4c000118)
> #define MPI_UNSIGNED_CHAR  ((MPI_Datatype)0x4c000102)
> #define MPI_BYTE           ((MPI_Datatype)0x4c00010d)
> #define MPI_WCHAR          ((MPI_Datatype)0x4c00040e)
> #define MPI_SHORT          ((MPI_Datatype)0x4c000203)
> #define MPI_UNSIGNED_SHORT ((MPI_Datatype)0x4c000204)
> #define MPI_INT            ((MPI_Datatype)0x4c000405)
> #define MPI_UNSIGNED       ((MPI_Datatype)0x4c000406)
> #define MPI_LONG           ((MPI_Datatype)0x4c000407)
> #define MPI_UNSIGNED_LONG  ((MPI_Datatype)0x4c000408)
> #define MPI_FLOAT          ((MPI_Datatype)0x4c00040a)
> #define MPI_DOUBLE         ((MPI_Datatype)0x4c00080b)
> #define MPI_LONG_DOUBLE    ((MPI_Datatype)0x4c000c0c)
> #define MPI_LONG_LONG_INT  ((MPI_Datatype)0x4c000809)
> #define MPI_UNSIGNED_LONG_LONG ((MPI_Datatype)0x4c000819)
> #define MPI_LONG_LONG      MPI_LONG_LONG_INT
>
> Anyone can tell me what is the meaning of those hex values? and why does the author use them?
> why do they define "MPI_CHAR" as ((MPI_Datatype)0x4c000101) instead of "char"?
> thx
>
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--
Jeff Hammond
Argonne Leadership Computing Facility
University of Chicago Computation Institute
jhammond at alcf.anl.gov / (630) 252-5381
http://www.linkedin.com/in/jeffhammond
https://wiki.alcf.anl.gov/parts/index.php/User:Jhammond