[Mpi-forum] MPI "Allocate receive" proposal

[Matthieu Dorier]

Sorry I only read only half of the exchanges, but I see many open questions here while another solution could be easier and more elegant, in my opinion: just provide MPI_Iprobe.

The main problem we have here is the fact that it is not possible to use MPI_Probe in a Wait/Test array, which I agree is an important problem (I ran into it myself no later than this summer). Yet from the MPI_Arecv proposal, my immediate question is "What if I don't want MPI to use malloc but another function (e.g. cudaMalloc, or any other custom allocators, for instance those from the C++ STL, or an allocator that allocates in a shared memory, etc.)?"

MPI_Iprobe(int source, int tag, MPI_Comm comm, MPI_Request* req)
seems to resolve everything: we can use the request in a test/wait array, as soon as it completes we can get the status using MPI_Request_get_status, and get all the informations we would have had from a normal MPI_Probe. From there, the user is free to allocate its buffer the way she wants, and do either an MPI_Recv or an MPI_Irecv with this buffer.

To be honest I also don't like the idea of having a library internally allocate memory for me that I should free outside of the library afterward (except if it's specifically the goal of that library), it's a good way of forgetting to free the buffer and it disallows any flexibility in the way the memory is allocated.

Matthieu