The upcoming January 2012 MPI Forum meeting is the last meeting to get new material into the MPI-3.0 specification.

Specifically, there are three steps to getting something into the MPI specification: a formal reading and two separate votes.  Each of these three steps must happen at a separate meeting.  This makes adding new material a long process… but that’s a good thing in terms of a standard.  You want to be sure.  You need a good amount of time of reflection and investigation before you standardize something for the next 10-20 years.

Of course, due to the deadline, we have a giant list of proposals up for a first reading in January (this is not including the 1st and 2nd votes also on the agenda).  Here’s what’s on the docket so far — some are big, new things, while others are small clarifications to existing language:

• Reference-counted MPI_INIT/FINALIZE -- Ticket #302
• Adding clarification to MPI_WIN_LOCK_ALL — Ticket #298
• Run-through stabilization (fault tolerance) -- Ticket #276
• Helper Threads — Ticket #217
• Endpoints (thread addressability) — Ticket #310
• MPI Comm Group Create — Ticket #286 and Ticket #305
• New RMA goodness -- Ticket #308 and Ticket #309
• Shared Memory Window Allocation — Ticket #284
• Remove deprecated functions -- Ticket #278
• MPI_ICOMM_DUP — Ticket #168
• Nonblocking collective I/O routines — Ticket #273
• MPI_TYPE_CREATE_INDEXED_BLOCK — Ticket #280
• Scalable vector collectives — Ticket #264

Tags: HPC, mpi, MPI-3.0