Dear MPI RMA Group, We have several partial MPI RMA proposals. To move forward, we need to have a better understanding of the real needs by users, and we will probably need to make some tough decisions about what we will support and what we won't (as Marc has noted, some fairly obvious shared memory operations are very tough in OpenMP, so its clear that being universal isn't requred). What we'd like by this *Friday* are some specific examples of operations that are hard to achieve in MPI RMA *and* that have a clear application need. What we *don't* want is simply "we should have a better Put", "we need active messages", or "the implementations I've used are too slow". What we do want is something like the following: We've implemented a halo exchange with MPI-RMA, and the construction of the Memory windows is awkward and limiting, particularly if the domains are created dynamically, making it hard to create the memory windows collectively. We need either a method that lets us export a local window or a way to allow all processes to refer to one single window (something like the MPI_WIN_WORLD proposal). Example code can be found at <url here> (or post on wiki). or We need a fetch and increment (or something similar) to implement a remote lock that will allow us to make a complex series of remote updates (and accesses) atomically that are needed for <specific application description here>. As shown in Using MPI-2, while a fetch and increment is possible in MPI-RMA, it is extremely complex and awkward. We'll take these examples and compare them to the current proposals and the original MPI RMA in order to evaluate where we are. Again, please send us your concrete requirements by Friday, Feb 5th. Thanks! Bill and Rajeev 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