Tomorrow I’m headed to Helsinki, Finland for a couple of weeks to attend the next MPI Forum meeting and EuroPVM/MPI 2009. Although I’m unsure how productive the Forum meeting will be because many participants cannot attend this particular meeting, it should be a noteworthy meeting. Barring any unforeseen problems we should ratify the new version of the MPI Standard, MPI-2.2. This version of the document corrects many problems with the 2.1 Standard and adds several new features. I could list them all here but Torsten has done a pretty good job of it already, so I’ll send you over to his post on the matter.
Most of my MPI Forum work since the 2.1 effort ended has been on ticket #18, which adds predefined named MPI datatypes for many C99 types like int32_t, _Bool, and double _Complex. The lesson to be learned from this ticket is to always separate sufficiently separable changes, even if they are very related. There were several points at which this ticket was nearly derailed and postponed until MPI-3.0. The voting process used by the MPI Forum has only a single path by which tickets can make it into the Standard but many ways they can be removed from consideration. Everything is fine with the ticket now, but if I had separated it into the three logically distinct changes that it makes (fixed-width integers, C99 complex types, and MPI_Aint/Offset types) there would have been a better chance of getting something rather than nothing in for MPI-2.2.
My understanding is that Rolf will be printing up hardbound copies of the MPI-2.2 standard for purchase at SC09, much like he did with the MPI-2.1 standard. It makes for a handy reference when debating standardization issues or implementing the Standard, so I’m planning on buying a copy. It’s also one of the few dead-tree publications to actually have my name in it somewhere, so that doesn’t hurt either ;)
EuroPVM/MPI 2009 should also be enjoyable, since it is a good opportunity to get together with others in the fairly small world of MPI implementation development. I have a paper there (together with several other authors) entitled “MPI on a Million Processors” that explores scalability issues inherent in the MPI Standard. I’ll post a copy online somewhere after the conference.
If I feel especially motivated I might post some updates and photos from the trip here. We’ll see how busy I am at the conferences and how bad the jet lag hits me…