IV. RTE/MPI relative modex responsibilities The modex operation conducted during MPI_Init currently involves the exchange of two critical pieces of information:
1. the location (i.e., node) of each process in my job so I can determine who shares a node with me. This is subsequently used by the shared memory subsystem for initialization and message routing; and 2. BTL contact info for each process in my job. During our recent efforts to further abstract the RTE from the MPI layer, we pushed responsibility for both pieces of information into the MPI layer. This wasn't done capriciously - the modex has always included the exchange of both pieces of information, and we chose not to disturb that situation. However, the mixing of these two functional requirements does cause problems when dealing with an environment such as the Cray where BTL information is "exchanged" via an entirely different mechanism. In addition, it has been noted that the RTE (and not the MPI layer) actually "knows" the node location for each process. Hence, questions have been raised as to whether: (a) the modex should be built into a framework to allow multiple BTL exchange mechansims to be supported, or some alternative mechanism be used - one suggestion made was to implement an MPICH-like attribute exchange; and (b) the RTE should absorb responsibility for providing a "node map" of the processes in a job (note: the modex may -use- that info, but would no longer be required to exchange it). This has a number of implications that need to be carefully considered - e.g., the memory required to store the node map in every process is non-zero. On the other hand: (i) every proc already -does- store the node for every proc - it is simply stored in the ompi_proc_t structures as opposed to somewhere in the RTE. We would want to avoid duplicating that storage, but there would be no change in memory footprint if done carefully. (ii) every daemon already knows the node map for the job, so communicating that info to its local procs may not prove a major burden. However, the very environments where this subject may be an issue (e.g., the Cray) do not use our daemons, so some alternative mechanism for obtaining the info would be required. So the questions to be considered here are: (a) do we leave the current modex "as-is", to include exchange of the node map, perhaps including "#if" statements to support different exchange mechanisms? (b) do we separate the two functions currently in the modex and push the requirement to obtain a node map into the RTE? If so, how do we want the MPI layer to retrieve that info so we avoid increasing our memory footprint? (c) do we create a separate modex framework for handling the different exchange mechanisms for BTL info, do we incorporate it into an existing one (if so, which one), the new publish-subscribe framework, implement an alternative approach, or...? (d) other suggestions? Ralph
