Let's make sure we are using the right language -- Unified does not guarantee that "public win == private win". It guarantees that they are *eventually* the same, not immediately and always the same. It is completely allowable for processes to have inconsistent views of the window (because there are cached copies of the data and buffered reads/writes). The question we are debating is whether it is a reasonable semantic that those inconsistent views become eventually consistent without additional MPI calls by target processes. And, if we choose to keep the "eventual" semantic that we currently have, whether any ordering imposed by other processes should be observed by the target process in load/store operations, provided that process performs no window synchronization calls. ~Jim. On Wed, Jul 31, 2013 at 7:30 PM, Pavan Balaji <[email protected]> wrote:

On 07/31/2013 12:58 PM, Sur, Sayantan wrote:

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On 07/31/2013 12:00 PM, Jim Dinan wrote:

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I would bet that past Jim suggested striking the polling/eventually visibile clause and relying on window synchronization to see updates. :)

Yup, so did past, present, and future Pavan. IMO, that's a useless guarantee.

The downside to this is that libraries like SHMEM that rely on

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passive progress and polling, would not be implementable on top of Unified.

It's pretty useless even for SHMEM, since the user doesn't know when the data is valid. You could poll on a byte for it to turn to one, but at that point you only know about that one byte and nothing else.

Past Sayantan had missed this discussion, but present Sayantan does agree that "eventually" as defined is useless. But he is also confused by the guarantee given by MPI_Win_flush, that when the call returns, all previously issued RMA ops are complete locally and remotely + UNIFIED (public win == private win).

Unfortunately, that part slipped the checks of the folks who believed you need a WIN_SYNC. So the standard is inconsistent. We have now made a full circle and gotten back to where this email thread started :-).

-- Pavan Balaji http://www.mcs.anl.gov/~balaji ______________________________**_________________ mpi3-rma mailing list [email protected] http://lists.mpi-forum.org/**mailman/listinfo.cgi/mpi3-rma<http://lists.mpi-forum.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/mpi3-rma>