Let me make a separate blog entry to answer those.

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I imagine this may be an involved question, but can you describe the difference between the current situation and true background progression? Does the lack of background progression mean having to occasionally explicitly relinquish control to MPI in order to let one-sided operations proceed? Once true background progression is in place, would it involve extra threads and context switching, or use some other mechanism?

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I predict it’ll still be quite a while before all of MPI-3 is fully fully fully implemented in the major MPI implementations. For example, while Open MPI is “working on it”, having true background progression (which is really required for some of the new MPI-3 one-sided stuff) is a fairly large architectural change for us, and will take time. I don’t see this particular feature being done before next summer, at the earliest.

That being said, a bunch of other things are implemented in OMPI already:

- New mpi_f08 Fortran module and revamped mpi Fortran module (for non-gfortran compilers)
- Most of the MPI-3 one-sided stuff
- Basic implementations of the non-blocking collectives
- Bunches of other little things (e.g., the new MPI_REDUCE_LOCAL function)

We haven’t made a conclusive list yet of all the MPI-3 things we’ve implemented so far in Open MPI; we will likely do so before the v1.7 release (scheduled for this Fall).

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