[Mpi3-rma] MPI-3 UNIFIED model clarification

Underwood, Keith D keith.d.underwood at intel.com
Fri Aug 2 16:45:20 CDT 2013


> > At one point, them using their own memory fences was accepted as part
> > of it, because it provides " the performance and "safety" of threads,
> > localized to a window".  Those same people have to use memory fences
> > for threads to work right too.
> 
> Then what were you trying to say here:
> 
> >> > Oh, I think we want it to say that they are identical.  I believe
> >> > that is the only way to let the user actually use it.
> 
> "identical" means located at the same memory address, but the user is
> responsible for memory ordering if they don't use MPI_Win_sync?

Yes - identical means "landing in the same physical memory and kept coherent".  The entire discussion about memory ordering is about cores doing aggressive reordering of instructions across boundaries that are unfriendly to multithreaded coding.  The place where we actually have a problem in the spec may be the ordering definition; however, I don't think we have a problem.  Delivering in order is still necessary for some use cases and it is not the fault of the API that a core has reordered loads.  It is the job of the user to deal with the fact that their core reorders those loads - just like they would have to in multithreaded programming.




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