Torsten Hoefler’s blog

Yes, still stuck in Rainland. This year’s SC was the best I ever attended to be honest. It felt like I know everybody and I was invited to two to three parties every evening (awesome). My work was presented at the MPI Forum BoF and the FASTOS BoF. I was also invited to present parts [...]

They should have called the place “Rainland” but ok, I brought an umbrella .
This week’s MPI Forum was very interesting! Marc Snir presented his convincing hybrid proposal. It’s really nice and orthogonal to the current standard. It needs some minor polishing and an implementation and seems ready to go.
We had some incremental discussions [...]

I presented our initial work on Offloading Collective Operations, which is the definition of an Assembly language for group operations (GOAL), at ICPP’09 in Vienna. I was rather disappointed by this year’s ICPP. We had some problems with the program selection already before the conference (I’ll happily tell you details on request) and the final [...]

This year’s EuroPVM/MPI was held in Helsinki (not quite, but close to it). I stayed in Hanasaari, a beautiful island with a small hotel and conference center on it. It’s a bit remote but nicely surrounded by nature.
The conference was nice, I learned about formal verification of MPI programs in the first day’s tutorial. This [...]

I just came back from lunch after the MPI Forum meeting in Helsinki. This meeting focused again (the last time) on MPI 2.2. We finished the review of the final document and edited several minor things. Bill did a great job in chairing and pushing the MPI 2.2 work and the overall editing. Unfortunately, we [...]

We just finished all voting on the last MPI-2.2 tickets! This means that MPI-2.2 is fixed now, no changes are possible. The remaining work is simply to merge the accepted tickets into the final draft that will be voted on next time in Helsinki. I just finished editing my parts of the standard draft. Everything [...]

We’re now convening since more than a year and we just finished the 9th meeting! On the way, we released the rather unspectacular MPI-2.1 at EuroPVM 2008 in Dublin (but hey, everything is in a single document now!) which didn’t really change anything.
Then, we decided to go for MPI-2.2 which might change something but doesn’t [...]

Now that I’ve been here multiple times, I thought I just have to try the thing they call “Cisco Burger” in their cafeteria . So I got one and must say that it’s not better than most American burgers I had before (but what did I expect). Here’s a picture for completeness:

Today was the first official reading of my Nonblocking Collective Operation proposal for MPI-3. It was a bit to short but it went really good. There were lots of discussions about clarifying the text, but the semantics are mainly fixed now. It looks like everything can be fixed before the next meeting. A picture made [...]

Just came back from the third MPI Forum in Chicago. We finished MPI-2.1 (I guess) … mostly. I think we’ll just have to vote on it at the next meeting . It’s good that this is finished and we have a nice single document mandating the newest MPI standard. We’ve also been able to [...]