Jeff - I think the idea is ok, but I think the name needs some thought. There's currently two ways to have the lower layers be thread safe -- enabling MPI threads or progress threads. The two can be done independently -- you can disable MPI threads and still enable thread support by enabling progress threads.
So either that behavior would need to change or we need a better name (in my opinion...). Brian On Jan 28, 2010, at 8:53 PM, Jeff Squyres wrote: > WHAT: Rename --enable-mpi-threads and ENABLE_MPI_THREADS to > --enable-thread-safety and ENABLE_THREAD_SAFETY, respectively > (--enable-mpi-threads will be maintained as a synonym to > --enable-thread-safety for backwards compat, of course). > > WHY: Other projects are starting to use ORTE and OPAL without OMPI. The fact > that thread safety in OPAL and ORTE requires a configure switch with "mpi" in > the name is very non-intuitive. > > WHERE: A bunch of places in the code; see attached patch. > > WHEN: Next Friday COB > > TIMEOUT: COB, Friday, Feb 5, 2010 > > ------------------------ > > More details: > > Cisco is starting to investigate using ORTE and OPAL in various threading > scenarios -- without the OMPI layer. The fact that you need to enable thread > safety in ORTE/OPAL with a configure switch that has the word "mpi" in it is > extremely counter-intuitive (it bit some of our engineers very badly, and > they were mighty annoyed!!). > > Since this functionality actually has nothing to do with MPI (it's actually > the other way around -- MPI_THREAD_MULTIPLE needs this functionality), we > really should rename this switch and the corresponding AC_DEFINE -- I suggest: > > --enable|disable-thread-safety > ENABLE_THREAD_SAFETY > > Of course, we need to keep the configure switch > "--enable|disable-mpi-threads" for backwards compatibility, so that can be a > synonym to --enable-thread-safety. > > See the attached patch (the biggest change is in > opal/config/opal_config_threads.m4). If there are no objections, I'll commit > this next Friday COB. > > -- > Jeff Squyres > jsquy...@cisco.com > <opal-thread-safety.diff>_______________________________________________ > devel mailing list > de...@open-mpi.org > http://www.open-mpi.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/devel -- Brian W. Barrett Dept. 1423: Scalable System Software Sandia National Laboratories
