[MPI3-IO] [EXTERNAL] New MPI-IO routines

[Mohamad Chaarawi]

Hi Jay,

On 5/24/2012 3:08 PM, Lofstead, Gerald F II wrote:
> I can see the usefulness of this beyond the SWMR case (essentially queue a
> bunch of IO ops in the background and come back when they are all done)

yes that is definitely useful in many cases, especially if the file 
manipulation routines are nonblocking too..

> and wonder is there a broader agenda that should be looked at for this?
> For example, is the non-blocking, but ordered idea something useful for
> messaging as well? Personally, I think so. Given that, is it worth
> exploring this in a broader context to add the non-blocking, ordered style
> to MPI as a whole?

I am not aware of anyone exploring this beyond I/O. I can't answer the 
question if it's worthwhile to do this for ALL MPI, but I don't see why 
it would not be possible.. Datatype creation is something that I could 
think of, which would benefit well from this and would go nice with the 
I/O version of such routines.

>
> Other than an explicit queue mechanism to execute these in series, what
> are the complexity problems you envision? It seems really straightforward.

There's that, and there is the consistency semantics issue, where the 
library needs to make sure that the operations are atomic.

Thanks,
Mohamad

>
> Jay Lofstead
>
> On 5/24/12 12:39 PM, "Mohamad Chaarawi"<chaarawi at hdfgroup.org>  wrote:
>
>> Hi all,
>>
>> We would like to get a discussion going on adding new routines to the
>> standard that would support non-blocking but ordered access routines,
>> and non-blocking ordered file manipulation routines. They would be two
>> separate tickets but they share similar semantics.
>>
>> So basically what we would like is that when we call:
>> 1) iwrite_at()
>> 2) iread_at()
>> 3) iwrite_at()
>> ...
>> 4) waitall()
>>
>> We would like to see the data accessed as if the calls were blocking.
>> This could translate to something like:
>> iwrite_at()
>> iwait()
>> iread_at()
>> iwait()
>> iwrite_at()
>> iwait()
>>
>> There is ofcourse no such thing as iwait, but you get the idea :-)
>>
>> Our use case for this is the SWMR functionality that is being worked on,
>> where the non-blocking version would require the MPI library to remember
>> the order in which the operations were called; otherwise I don't see how
>> we can enforce this ordering and at the same time keep the entire I/O
>> access nonblocking.
>> We probably need to rename the routines (something other than the i
>> prefix) because the semantics are different from the current
>> non-blocking routines. Maybe aread/awrite (a for asynchronous).
>>
>> Another feature we are considering is the non-blocking file manipulation
>> routines. Similarly to the semantics described above, the library needs
>> to remember the order they are called.
>> iopen
>> iset_view
>> iwrite
>> iclose
>> ...
>> waitall()
>>
>> Again since the semantics are different in the way other immediate
>> routines are defined, we need to reconsider the naming.
>>
>> Any thoughts?
>>
>> Thanks,
>> Mohamad
>>
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>
>
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