Dear all,
I would like to do one-sided communication as implementation of a
Fortran coarray library. "MPI provides three synchronization mechanisms:
"1. The MPI_WIN_FENCE collective synchronization call supports a simple
synchronization pattern that is often used in parallel computations:
namely a loosely-synchronous model, where global computation phases
alternate with global communication phases. [...]
"2. The four functions MPI_WIN_START, MPI_WIN_COMPLETE, MPI_WIN_POST,
and MPI_WIN_WAIT [...]
"3. Finally, shared lock access is provided by the functions
MPI_WIN_LOCK, MPI_WIN_LOCK_ALL, MPI_WIN_UNLOCK, and MPI_WIN_UNLOCK_ALL."
(MPIv3, p.438)
I would like to use mechanism 1, but leaving the Win_lock/Win_unlock
away does not work. How is one supposed to use the first mechanism? (I
haven't tried to specify the "no_locks" for "info", but that shouldn't
matter, should it?)
Follow up question: Is it semantically correct to have concurrent write
access to adjacent array elements with method 1? I mean something like
using an array of single-byte elements (integer(kind=1)) where process 2
sets (MPI_Win_put) the elements with odd array indexes and process 3 the
ones with even indexes of an array located in process 1? By itself, one
writes to different memory locations, but the hardware cannot typically
not update single bytes atomically in the memory but only chunks of
(e.g.) 4 bytes. The problem is that this access is semantically
permitted by Fortran while at the same time, I do not want to do
unnecessary locking. In practical terms, accessing the same window/array
for MPI_Win_put simultaneously will occur for halo exchange - but it is
likely to not access directly adjacent memory.
Secondly, I probably missed something but is it possible to access
arbitrary remote memory without requiring to call something collectively
(such as MPI_Win_create)? The usage case is a derived type (C
equivalent: struct) which contains a pointer. The derived type/struct
(being a coarray in my case) has an associated MPI_Win - and I can hence
obtain the address to which the pointer component points to. That
address I would then like to use for MPI_Put/MPI_Get - without support
of the remove side and, in particular, without calling a collective on
all all processes. Any idea how to do this?
The Fortran case is simply:
coarray[remote_process_idx]%pointer_comp = [1, 2, 3, 4]
where one assigns data to a component of a coarray - but as
"pointer_comp" is not in the window, one has to get first the remote
address of the pointer and then can use it to set the value of the pointer.
Tobias
Tobias
