[Mpi3-ft] Broken MPI_Request_free

[Howard Pritchard]

Hello Greg,

I'm not seeing a problem here from the perspective of the ft discussions.
An application calling MPI_Request_free by no means implies that the
mpi library isn't internally tracking the progress of the request.  

As far as the ft discussions have gone, my understanding was that we aren't 
guaranteeing that an app gets notification of an error on a per message basis. 
For example, given the discussions we'd had I expect the scenario below to be 
valid:

MPI_Isend(message a, &req_a)
MPI_Isend(message b, &req_b)

(problem happens to the dest process such that mpi detects message b wasn't 
properly delivered)

MPI_Wait(req_a)  <------------  app gets notification of error condition on 
comm here, mpi doesn't wait for app to wait/test for req_b.

Nonetheless, its probably not smart for a ft mpi app to make use of 
MPI_Request_free except possibly in very restricted cases.

Specific comments interlaced below:

On Monday 01 December 2008 09:52:47 Greg Bronevetsky wrote:
> A while ago we discussed how MPI_Request_free is hopelessly broken
> and should be removed from the MPI spec. The issue is coming back up
> in the MPI collectives group and I'd like to put together a short
> list of reasons for why we want to remove it. I recall the following:
> - If there is an error in the original non-blocking operation, no
> clear place to return the error back to the application.
presumably an application using this function has some app specific means for 
dealing with error cases.  
> - On single-threaded architectures (BG/L CNK, Cray Catamount) it is
> completely possible for the non-blocking operation to not complete
> until MPI_Finalize because the application is not required to issue
> any more MPI calls during which progress may be made on the communication.
Why is this a problem?
> - Complicates compiler analysis of MPI applications because it is not
> clear from the source code when MPI is done with the application buffer.
Could you explain how MPI_Request_free introduces any additional complications 
over those already presented to, in particular, fortran compilers by the non-
blocking send/recv operations?
> - Unsafe since the fact that a message arrives at the destination
> processor does not guarantee that the OS on the sender processor has
> let go of the send buffer. As such, we need to either remove
> MPI_Request_free or be clearer about what message arrival implies
> about how MPI and the OS manage memory. (Erez, does this sound right?)
The MPI implementation (if its correctly implemented) is still tracking the 
request to completion - at least every mpi implementation I've worked with 
does.

Howard

>
> Can anybody think of other reasons?
>
> Greg Bronevetsky
> Post-Doctoral Researcher
> 1028 Building 451
> Lawrence Livermore National Lab
> (925) 424-5756
> bronevetsky1 at llnl.gov
>
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