[mpich-discuss] Behavioral change for MPI_Ibarrier(MPI_COMM_SELF, &r) in mpich-3.2

[Jed Brown]

So what's the plan here?  Is MPICH-3.3 going to return to the expected behavior?

William Gropp <wgropp at illinois.edu> writes:

> I agree.  This is a perverse interpretation.  While I understand the optimization, the nonblocking routines should return an active request, not a null request.  (The real optimization is probably in not creating the request, rather than freeing it; while requests should be managed in such a way that creation is cheap, its likely that defensive coding will initialize the request, which can be non-trivial.  Still, this doesn’t seem worth the surprise to the user.)
>
> Bill
>
> William Gropp
> Director, Parallel Computing Institute
> Thomas M. Siebel Chair in Computer Science
> Chief Scientist, NCSA
> University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
>
>
>
>
>
> On Dec 7, 2015, at 9:29 AM, Jeff Squyres (jsquyres) <jsquyres at cisco.com> wrote:
>
>> I understand the optimization here, but I think Jed does have a point: it is weird.
>> 
>> Further, MPI-3.1 5.1.2 p196:38-39 states:
>> 
>>    "A nonblocking call initiates a collective operation, which must be completed in a separate completion call."
>> 
>> Arguably, this does not directly state that you need to return a valid request from any of the NBCs.  But it's a reasonable interpretation to believe that it should.
>> 
>> Further, Jed is right that this might be a micro-optimization (i.e., avoiding the creation or deallocation of a request), but it doesn't help much unless the app also does an associated "if" to test and see if the request==MPI_REQUEST_NULL and therefore doesn't call TEST*/WAIT* (i.e., that would be a further micro-optimization -- which probably isn't negated by the app's "if" because TEST*/WAIT* have to do the same "if" for REQUEST_NULL).
>> 
>> In short: yes, this is a micro-optimization.  But:
>> 
>> a) it kinda falls in the "violates the law of least astonishment" category
>> b) is deallocating a free listed request that expensive?
>> c) if you have to explain this every time, are you really optimizing anything?
>> d) it's a single process case -- it's already damn fast. Do you really need to optimize it further?  :-)
>> 
>> (To be clear: I don't really care; I just bring up these points to highlight the other side of the story)
>> 
>> 
>>> On Dec 7, 2015, at 6:39 AM, Jeff Hammond <jeff.science at gmail.com> wrote:
>>> 
>>> Completed requests are set to MPI_REQUEST_NULL.  Since MPI_Ibarrier (and MPI_Barrier) is a no-op for a communicator of size 1, it is trivially complete and it would seem that MPICH is optimizing away the unnecessary request object here.
>>> 
>>> Why don't you use MPI_Test instead of direct comparison?
>>> 
>>> Jeff
>>> 
>>> On Sun, Dec 6, 2015 at 10:04 PM, Jed Brown <jed at jedbrown.org> wrote:
>>> In MPICH 3.2, MPI_Ibarrier(MPI_COMM_SELF,&r) returns r ==
>>> MPI_REQUEST_NULL.  This is also the case for other communicators of size
>>> 1.  Previous versions of MPICH and also all versions of Open MPI return
>>> a valid request not equal to MPI_REQUEST_NULL.  This bit me because it
>>> was natural to compare to MPI_REQUEST_NULL in a conditional for an
>>> Ibarrier/Issend/Iprobe algorithm.  It can be worked around with a
>>> slightly more complicate conditional, but is this change intentional?
>>> 
>>>  The call returns a request handle, which must be passed to a
>>>  completion call.
>>>  -- MPI-3 §5.12
>>> 
>>> This does not say "unless the communicator has size 1".
>>> 
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>>> 
>>> -- 
>>> Jeff Hammond
>>> jeff.science at gmail.com
>>> http://jeffhammond.github.io/
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>> 
>> 
>> -- 
>> Jeff Squyres
>> jsquyres at cisco.com
>> For corporate legal information go to: http://www.cisco.com/web/about/doing_business/legal/cri/
>> 
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