Jeff Squyres wrote:
On Apr 16, 2010, at 6:43 AM, Terry Dontje wrote:
If you are suggesting that you will make code that breaks a current rankfile
feature, note I am not talking about adding a new feature that isn't supported
by rankfile but something that used to work, then I think you are acting in
poor form. At a minimum you should at least give the community a heads up that
you are borking a feature.
Er... no.
There is nothing nefarious going on here. Ralph and I were just chatting yesterday about
some process affinity issues and the topic of rank_file came up (again). Remember that
rank_file was a "throw over the wall" kind of code contribution and has
historically been difficult to maintain. Neither of us were excited at the prospect of
adding hyperthreading support (once hwloc is finally released -- unfortunately, it's
blocking on me, at the moment...) and also having to extend rank file to support it.
I asked Ralph if we should deprecate rank_file since the other binding options
are available. He assumed (correctly, it turns out) that no one would go for
that. But I figured I'd ask anyway.
I think all Ralph is saying is that we're (I'm) likely to add hyperthreading
support in the not-distant future (and maybe Oracle will add support for
boards). This work is not likely to *break* rank_file, but neither of us are
excited about extending rank_file to support hyperthreading. If no one else
steps up to extend it, then it may become obsolete over time because it doesn't
support the things that people want.
I am ok with the above.
Terry -- perhaps it's time to resurrect the new processor affinity proposal
that you've been promising me for many months. If rank_file were replaced with
Something Better, I'd certainly be happy. ;-)
Can we then have Ralph implement it :-)... That was a joke Ralph!!!
--
Oracle
Terry D. Dontje | Principal Software Engineer
Developer Tools Engineering | +1.650.633.7054
Oracle * - Performance Technologies*
95 Network Drive, Burlington, MA 01803
Email terry.don...@oracle.com <mailto:terry.don...@oracle.com>
