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<div class="PlainText">Below is an email I BCC'ed to a bunch of MPI community people before we got this listserv, including Sean Hefty's original email and his slides.<br>
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I've already received some feedback on Sean's slides; I'll summarize what I've received so far in subsequent emails. Please feel free to comment / reply with more thoughts to the 3 specific questions asked below.<br>
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If it helps, we can certainly have a webex for wider discussion.<br>
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Begin forwarded message:<br>
<br>
> From: "Jeff Squyres (jsquyres)" <jsquyres@cisco.com><br>
> Subject: OpenFabrics lib fabric effort: next round of feedback<br>
> Date: April 23, 2014 6:45:08 AM EDT<br>
> To: "Jeff Squyres (jsquyres)" <jsquyres@cisco.com><br>
> Cc: Sean Hefty <sean.hefty@intel.com><br>
> <br>
> MPI Community (BCC'ed -- see below):<br>
> <br>
> Per our prior discussions back in January, the libfabric group is getting farther along in developing fabric-agnostic APIs. Sean Hefty, CC'ed, is the main technical leader of this effort.<br>
> <br>
> Sean sent an email last week that contains a PPT and a link to man pages for a bunch of proposed APIs. See his original email, including the PPT and link, below.<br>
> <br>
> This is very early days; these should probably be considered super-early-first-draft-here's-what-we're-thinking-about kinds of APIs. Many of them are similar to / influenced by the existing Linux verbs API. Many others are totally new / not anywhere close
to anything in Linux verbs.<br>
> <br>
> There's (at least) 3 questions on the table for the MPI community:<br>
> <br>
> 0. How do we want to have a discussion about this stuff? Do we want a listserv to jointly discuss the MPI-specific aspects of these APIs? (vs. me BCC'ing blastograms to you) Do we want to have another webex soon? ...?<br>
> <br>
> ** I ask this question because there's a larger / general libfabric API discussion going on that the greater MPI community may or may not care about. These occur (somewhat) on the OpenFabrics IWG listserv, and mostly on the Tuesday webexes (12pm US Eastern).
Do we want a place/time for MPI-specific aspects of this conversation?<br>
> <br>
> 1. As you can see in the PPT, there's some discussion occurring about how to integrate this new effort into the old Linux verbs API. a) Should all the new APIs just be "extensions" to Linux verbs? b) Should it be a whole new API? c) Should the new API
include (by value) the old Linux verbs APIs? d) ...?<br>
> <br>
> ** These questions are aimed at a) applications (e.g., MPI implementations) forward-porting to libfabric and b) vendors providing both verbs and libfabric support that can be compatible with each other.<br>
> <br>
> 2. What do you think of the *general direction* of these APIs? Don't yet harp on specific parameters and functions (expressed as function pointers in the PPT, BTW) -- just comment on whether you think the overall direction / high-level ideas are headed in
the right direction. And if not, indicate why not.<br>
> <br>
> -----<br>
> <br>
> For reference, here's who's BCC'ed in no particular order -- anyone missing? (my mail client decided to drop the BCC lists from the mails I sent back in January/February, so this list may not be complete)<br>
> <br>
> Dave Goodell <dgoodell@cisco.com><br>
> Cesare Cantù <cantuc@cisco.com><br>
> Reese Faucette <rfaucett@cisco.com><br>
> Amin Hassani <ahassani@cis.uab.edu><br>
> Brad Benton <Brad.Benton@amd.com><br>
> Charles J Archer <charles.j.archer@intel.com><br>
> Daniel Holmes <dholmes@epcc.ed.ac.uk><br>
> Devendar Bureddy <devendar@mellanox.com><br>
> Jeff Hammond <jeff.science@gmail.com><br>
> Michael Blocksome <blocksom@us.ibm.com><br>
> Michael Raymond <mraymond@sgi.com><br>
> Nathan Hjelm <hjelmn@lanl.gov><br>
> Pavel Shamis <shamisp@ornl.gov><br>
> Ron Brightwell <rbbrigh@sandia.gov><br>
> Sayantan Sur <sayantan.sur@intel.com><br>
> Ryan Grant <regrant@sandia.gov><br>
> Torsten Hoefler <htor@inf.ethz.ch><br>
> Chulho Kim <chulho@us.ibm.com><br>
> Carl Obert <obert@us.ibm.com><br>
> Perry Schmidt <pschmidt@us.ibm.com><br>
> Fab Tillier <ftillier@microsoft.com><br>
> Shane/Matthew Farmer <shanefarmer22@gmail.com><br>
> Howard Pritchard <howardp@cray.com><br>
> Tony Skjellum <tony@cis.uab.edu><br>
> <br>
> <br>
> Begin forwarded message:<br>
> <br>
> > From: "Hefty, Sean" <sean.hefty@intel.com><br>
> > Subject: [ofiwg] presentation from today's WG meeting<br>
> > Date: April 15, 2014 1:22:07 PM EDT<br>
> > To: "ofiwg@lists.openfabrics.org" <ofiwg@lists.openfabrics.org><br>
> > <br>
> > Attached is the presentation that I went over today. Next week's meeting will solicit responses from anyone regarding the *direction* of the proposal.<br>
> > <br>
> > As mentioned in today's meeting, the man page formats for the current APIs can be found in the source code or online here:<br>
> > <br>
> > <a href="https://www.openfabrics.org/downloads/OFIWG/API/">https://www.openfabrics.org/downloads/OFIWG/API/</a><br>
> > <br>
> > This is slightly older documentation and describes the static inline wrapper functions around the operations discussed in the attached slides. The *details* of the specific function calls is what would need discussion within the working group and the application
developers.<br>
> > <br>
> > For a merged effort, I would anticipate that in some cases the same set of function pointers could be usable between gen1 and gen2 APIs (e.g. msg_ops, rma_ops), but with differently named wrapper functions (e.g. fi_write versus ibv_write). An example of
this was in last week's presentation. In other cases, functions may not easily apply (e.g. tagged_ops) or only the concepts may be transferable (e.g. optimized poll CQ call). The CM functionality and their full integration would be an example of calls that
evolve from gen 1 to a gen 2.<br>
> > <br>
> > - Sean<br>
> > _______________________________________________<br>
> > ofiwg mailing list<br>
> > ofiwg@lists.openfabrics.org<br>
> > <a href="http://lists.openfabrics.org/mailman/listinfo/ofiwg">http://lists.openfabrics.org/mailman/listinfo/ofiwg</a><br>
> <br>
> <br>
> -- <br>
> Jeff Squyres<br>
> jsquyres@cisco.com<br>
> For corporate legal information go to: <a href="http://www.cisco.com/web/about/doing_business/legal/cri/">
http://www.cisco.com/web/about/doing_business/legal/cri/</a><br>
> <br>
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<div class="PlainText">> <br>
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-- <br>
Jeff Squyres<br>
jsquyres@cisco.com<br>
For corporate legal information go to: <a href="http://www.cisco.com/web/about/doing_business/legal/cri/">
http://www.cisco.com/web/about/doing_business/legal/cri/</a><br>
<br>
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