[ofa-general] New proposal for memory management

[Jeff Squyres]

On Apr 29, 2009, at 6:52 PM, Woodruff, Robert J wrote:

> I think if we did such a thing, we could implement a set of tag- 
> matching
> primitives (similar to MX or PSM) that are kind of a separate library
> from the OFA RDMA verbs, just like PSM for Qlogic is a separate  
> library and
> not part of the OFA verbs. Just like with MX and PSM, I think the  
> registration
> can be done my the tag-matching driver (like PSM or MX do) and
> not require MPI to do it. Think of this as "the MPI tag-matching  
> interface" library
> for OFA.
>

I would be extremely hesitant to have an OpenFabrics-provided library  
do this.  MPI implementations spend a *lot* of time an effort on this  
section of code because it is *the* heart of the MPI message passing  
engine.  To be blunt: here is not enough MPI expertise in the current  
set of OpenFabrics developers to build such a library.  I doubt that  
the academic and proprietary MPI implementations would want to  
contribute resources to make one, either (it's their secret sauce!).

Indeed, to make such a proposal work, there would, by definition, have  
to be new hardware capabilities, and therefore new verbs to support  
those hardware capabilities.  So this might just end up as new verbs  
anyway -- not a new middleware library.

-- 
Jeff Squyres
Cisco Systems