Excellent, thanks!

Scott

On Jan 7, 2011, at 10:28 AM, Phil Carns wrote:

> Sorry about the vagueness there :)
> 
> Maybe the better way to put it is that each BMI _method_ (bmi_tcp, 
> bmi_mx, etc.) is expected to provide reliable, ordered delivery with 
> flow control.  Neither the upper layer of BMI nor the users of BMI 
> provide those things, other than the fact that upper levels of PVFS will 
> at least timeout, cancel, and retry operations if they don't complete in 
> a reasonable amount of time.  That's a pretty crude last resort for that 
> kind of scenario, though.
> 
> Most of the current BMI methods rely on their respective underlying 
> protocols for flow control, but if you were writing a method for 
> something like UDP that has no flow control at all, then you would have 
> to implement it yourself in the method.
> 
> The flow component (despite its name) doesn't really do flow control.  
> It maybe gets part of the way there simply by capping the number of 
> buffers (and therefore number of messages) in flight for each I/O 
> request as part of its pipelining mechanism, but it doesn't keep up with 
> tokens or anything that tell it about the state of the remote peer.  
> It's just trying to make reasonable use of local resources.
> 
> -Phil
> 
> On 01/07/2011 09:06 AM, Atchley, Scott wrote:
>> Phil,
>> 
>> bmi-design.tex has this paragraph:
>> 
>> "BMI provides reliability, message ordering, and flow control. If a 
>> particular underlying protocol does not provide one of these features, then 
>> BMI is responsible for implementing it."
>> 
>> Does BMI actually provide flow control? Does it rely on the method to 
>> provide flow control? If so, I don't think I did anything with bmi_mx other 
>> than rely on MX's flow control.
>> 
>> Or does Flow (or another upper layer protocol) provide flow control?
>> 
>> Thanks,
>> 
>> Scott
>> 
>> On Jan 5, 2011, at 10:59 AM, Atchley, Scott wrote:
>> 
>>> Hi Phil,
>>> 
>>> Thanks, I'll take a look at it as well.
>>> 
>>> Scott
>>> 
>>> On Jan 5, 2011, at 10:52 AM, Phil Carns wrote:
>>> 
>>>> Hi Scott,
>>>> 
>>>> I'm afraid so.  The pvfs2 source tree also still has an old design
>>>> document in doc/design/bmi-design.tex.
>>>> 
>>>> -Phil
>>>> 
>>>> On 01/04/2011 03:09 PM, Atchley, Edward S. wrote:
>>>>> Hi all,
>>>>> 
>>>>> Is this still the only BMI paper?
>>>>> 
>>>>> BMI: A Network Abstraction Layer for Parallel I/O
>>>>> 
>>>>> Scott
>>>>> 
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> 


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