[Mpi-forum] Summary of decisions made at last week's forum meeting

[Schulz, Martin]

Hi all,

During last week's forum meeting, we made several decisions which have larger impact. Those are summarized below (please especially read the chapter committee and future meeting parts, which is very important) and are also in the slides that Jeff already posted to the web site. Also, I updated the main webpages to reflect this information - please let me know if you have any questions or comments.

Thanks,

Martin


1) Timeline for MPI 3.1

We decided (per formal vote) to stick with the timeline decided on in Chicago in December to aim for ratifying an MPI 3.1 standard (which is mainly the integration of errata and smaller additions) during the meeting in December 2014. This means we have the following timeline:
- Last chance for readings of new tickets was the March 2014 meeting
- Last chance for first votes during the June 2014 meeting
- Last chance for second votes during the September 2014 meeting in Japan (also last chance for adding errata items)
- Final chapter and document votes in December 2014


2) Document integration procedures for MPI 3.1

Chapter committees will be responsible for integrating and reviewing all changes into the standard document. For already voted in tickets, errata items, and ticket 0 changes, this process can start immediately, at the latest, though, this work needs to be done between the September and December meetings. Please keep in mind that we have SC and Thanksgiving in this time period and hence the earlier this process can start, the better. 

We decided to no longer use the Latex change macros for adding the new text, since those led to bad document quality (feel free to still use them for working group documents and ticket presentations - I am just talking about the main document). Instead we will rely on "svn diff" for change tracking. To make this work, please don't reflow any text! Also, please make sure you follow the document instructions contained in the MPI document repository (see README) to make sure we get a consistent document.

At the end of the process, every chapter committee chair is expected to provide:
- A new PDF of the chapter with all changes integrated (clean document, without any change bars)
- An SVN diff document (informal to help people track things) compared to a clean copy of MPI 3.0
- A side document detailing all changes from MPI 3.0 (tickets, errata item, ticket 0 items beyond typos, e.g., examples)
These documents need to be reviewed by the chapter committee and made available at least two weeks before the December meeting.


3) Chapter committees 

To make this process work, we need *active and responsive* chapter committees. The current members for each chapter are listed on the MPI 3.1 web pages. However, this information is a bit old by now and probably includes inactive members. Therefore:
- if you are on a chapter committee and want to continue to work on that role, please send me email in the next few weeks - otherwise, I'll assume you do no longer want to serve (which is fine as well)
- if you don't want to serve, you can also send me email and I'll remove you immediately.
- if you are not serving on a particular committee, but would like to, let me know and I'll add you

We also need to pick chairs again. For the following groups we have volunteers from the last forum:
- P2P: Dan Holmes
- Groups: Pavan Balaji
- RMA: Bill Gropp
- External interfaces: Pavan Balaji
- Tools: Kathryn Mohror
- Language Bindings: Jeff Squyres
but this is obviously not complete and we need more volunteers for the rest. Please let me know if you want to sign up for leading the integration and review efforts for one of the remaining chapters.


4) Tickets

We have many outdated tickets in the system and it is getting hard to distinguish them from the active ones. Please help cleaning up the system. In particular, we now have "version" entries for MPI 3.0 errata, MPI 3.1, and MPI 4.0. Those should be the only official categories for any currently open tickets. The also existing intermediate solution of "MPI <next>" will go away (that's where a majority of old tickets is) and I will close all those tickets in the next months. If you want to keep a ticket from this group alive, please adjust it to the right version. Also, new tickets should only be created after discussions in the working group and after the group decides to put this idea forward towards the MPI voting process. Before that, it would be better to maintain information in the working group Wikis.


5) Next meetings

We talked about the meeting schedule for 2015 - here are the proposed locations and dates:
- March 2-5 in Portland, OR
- June 1-4 in Chicago, IL
- September with EuroMPI (France?)
- December 7-10 in San Jose, CA
We are checking on room availability, but we also need to check for conflicts. If you are aware of any, please let me know asap. We should conclude this discussion at the latest by the next meeting so people have a fair warning.


6) Logo

Finally, we decided on a new logo (with a formal vote that produced a clear result in the first round of votes) - the forum decided to use the logo from group 1. Thanks to Huiwei Lu from ANL for creating it! Jeff and his team already switched the logo on the website (thanks!) and I'll make higher res versions available on the web site as well. 



________________________________________________________________________
Martin Schulz, schulzm at llnl.gov, http://people.llnl.gov/schulzm
CASC @ Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Livermore, USA