[Mpi3-rma] MPI-3 UNIFIED model clarification

[Jim Dinan]

Eek, yes, the "public and private copies are *identical*" text on pg 436
and elsewhere does not convey what we intended.  What we probably should
have said is something like "public and private copies are stored in the
same location."


On Fri, Aug 2, 2013 at 12:22 PM, Pavan Balaji <balaji at mcs.anl.gov> wrote:

> Jim,
>
> This is a good way to reason about UNIFIED, but it's not exactly what the
> MPI standard states.  It says that the public window is the same as the
> private window and not that they'll eventually be the same.  We could
> change it to say something like this, though.
>
>  -- Pavan
>
>
> On 08/01/2013 09:33 AM, Jim Dinan wrote:
>
>> Let's make sure we are using the right language -- Unified does not
>> guarantee that "public win == private win".  It guarantees that they are
>> *eventually* the same, not immediately and always the same.  It is
>> completely allowable for processes to have inconsistent views of the
>> window (because there are cached copies of the data and buffered
>> reads/writes).  The question we are debating is whether it is a
>> reasonable semantic that those inconsistent views become eventually
>> consistent without additional MPI calls by target processes.  And, if we
>> choose to keep the "eventual" semantic that we currently have, whether
>> any ordering imposed by other processes should be observed by the target
>> process in load/store operations, provided that process performs no
>> window synchronization calls.
>>
>>   ~Jim.
>>
>>
>> On Wed, Jul 31, 2013 at 7:30 PM, Pavan Balaji <balaji at mcs.anl.gov
>> <mailto:balaji at mcs.anl.gov>> wrote:
>>
>>
>>     On 07/31/2013 12:58 PM, Sur, Sayantan wrote:
>>
>>             On 07/31/2013 12:00 PM, Jim Dinan wrote:
>>
>>                 I would bet that past Jim suggested striking the
>>                 polling/eventually visibile clause and relying on window
>>                 synchronization to see updates. :)
>>
>>
>>             Yup, so did past, present, and future Pavan.  IMO, that's a
>>             useless
>>             guarantee.
>>
>>                 The downside to this is that libraries like SHMEM that
>>                 rely on
>>                 passive progress and polling, would not be implementable
>>                 on top
>>                 of Unified.
>>
>>
>>             It's pretty useless even for SHMEM, since the user doesn't
>> know
>>             when the data is valid.  You could poll on a byte for it to
>>             turn to
>>             one, but at that point you only know about that one byte and
>>             nothing else.
>>
>>
>>         Past Sayantan had missed this discussion, but present Sayantan
>> does
>>         agree that "eventually" as defined is useless. But he is also
>>         confused by the guarantee given by MPI_Win_flush, that when the
>> call
>>         returns, all previously issued RMA ops are complete locally and
>>         remotely + UNIFIED (public win == private win).
>>
>>
>>     Unfortunately, that part slipped the checks of the folks who
>>     believed you need a WIN_SYNC.  So the standard is inconsistent.  We
>>     have now made a full circle and gotten back to where this email
>>     thread started :-).
>>
>>
>>     --
>>     Pavan Balaji
>>     http://www.mcs.anl.gov/~balaji
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>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
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>>
> --
> Pavan Balaji
> http://www.mcs.anl.gov/~balaji
>
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