The Japan MPI Forum was rather “mild” until the last day where we had all the votes. Several controversial things came up for vote and many things that were not ready were pushed for a vote. We were 16 organizations eligible for voting and each ticket would only need 9 yes votes to get in, rather small imho.
While I am not 100% sure about the decision making process in the Forum, I think we made mostly sane decisions (some exception are of course strengthening this rule :-)).
Executive summary:
- no fault tolerance for MPI-3.0: the Forum decided against the proposal
- no “true” nonblocking I/O functions in MPI-3.0
- no helper threads in MPI-3.0
- removing the C++ bindings passed the first vote — scary!
Now to the detailed actions/votes:
First Votes
- the small fixes #187 and #192 passed
- #194 (allow non-rectangular MPI_Dims_create) was withdrawn based on comments
- #195 (topology awareness in MPI_Dims_create) was rejected because the ticket was obviously not ready/clean
- #217 (helper Threads) was rejected, it was always controversial
- #256 (MPI_PROC_NULL behavior for MPI_PROBE) passed
- #271 (functions to query MPI_Info object) passed, George raised an issue with the naming that we should fox before the final release
- #273 (immediate versions of nonblocking collective I/O routines) was rejected, got very close but raised the concerns that there is no optimized implementation even for the split I/O right now
- #278 (update examples to not use deprecated constructs) passed
- #281 (remove C++ bindings) passed, unfortunately, long live C++ exceptions!
- #294 (MPI_UNWEIGHTED should not be NULL) passed (clearly)
- #300 (minor issue in One Sided) passed (clearly)
- #303 (move MPI-2 deprecated functions to new “Removed interfaces”) was rejected after some discussion
- #313 (fixing init init and finalize) passed
- #310 (clarify MPI behavior when multiple MPI processes run in the same address space) was rejected because it was felt that it”s inconsistent with #313
- #317 (correct error related to MPI_REQUEST_FREE) passed (trivial fix)
- #323 (new FT proposal) was rejected, it was controversial before and seemed to be edited until the last second. #326 and #327 were withdrawn based on that vote. So this means essentially no FT for MPI-3.0
- #328 (fix MPI_PROC_NULL behavior for mprobe/improbe/mrecv/imrecv) passed
Second Votes
- the two simple (nearly ticket-0) RMA changes #308 and #309 passed unanimously
- #284 (allocate shared memory window) passed – woohoo! I thought the idea was dead a long time ago!
- #280 (hindexed_block) passed, as expected
- #168 (nonblocking communicator duplication) passed
- #272 (remove C++ bindings in nonblocking colls) passed 🙁
- #286 (noncollective communicator creation) passed!
- #305 (update MPI_Intercomm_create to use collective tag space) passed