[Mpi3-tools] Results from the MPI_T reading / Open issues and next steps

[Martin Schulz]

Hi all,

We had a formal reading at this week's MPI forum in Chicago.
We did get a lot of feedback and, while many comments were
focusing on grammar and language, we also had a few more
technical issues which were considered not ticket 0:

- The naming issue came up. The single "T" wasn't received
well, but people could live with it, if alternatives (like MPI_Tools)
are too long (I'll see what fits). If you have ant good ideas what
could be there instead of Tools please let me know.

- Either way, to conform with MPI naming conversion, we need
to change the first upper case letter to lower case, i.e.:
MPI_T_Cvar_get_info we need MPI_T_cvar_get_info

- One comment was that the things measured by the Pvar
interface are almost entirely (all?) unsigned values and hence
we should switch to unsigned data types (or at least include
them). Also, we should include MPI_LONG.

- Some people (especially for platforms with lean OSes)
didn't like the signal safety text - I will create a rewrite
and send that around for discussion

- It was suggested to add a "non-atomic" flag to
Pvar_get_info to identify variables that are cannot
be passed to Pvar_readreset.

I will update the text to reflect these comments
(in the next 1-2 weeks) and will send that around.
After that we will arrange a phone call to go over any
open issues. If there are any comments on the issues
raised before that, please let me know.

Thanks,

Martin