I think part of the way to address this (too many sync functions) is follow through on another of Torsten's recommendations - provide better user-oriented material on using the interface. Most libraries these days have large numbers of methods/functions; this complaint usually means "I can't figure out which routines to use" not "there are too many routines". Bill On Dec 13, 2009, at 11:48 AM, Torsten Hoefler wrote:

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Since one of the criticisms of the current interface is too many synchronization functions, it may be worth looking into whether the synchronization requirements can be relaxed in some way in the cache coherent case.

I would like to hear more about this criticism. I think the current set of functions is rather elegant (only the group argument in the PSCW model is a bit uncommon). But fence reflects BSP nicely and lock/ unlock (if we have p2p windows) is a nice remote update mechanism.

William Gropp Deputy Director for Research Institute for Advanced Computing Applications and Technologies Paul and Cynthia Saylor Professor of Computer Science University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign