1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
|
Nonblocking operations initiate a communication call and then return control
to the application. The user who wishes to exploit nonblocking communication
as a technique for latency hiding by overlapping communication with
computation implicitly assumes that progress in communication can be made in a
purely computational phase of the program execution when no communication
calls are made.
All the non-blocking transfer functions are prototyped to work as transfers
with both "explicit" and "implicit handle". It stores important information
about the initiated data transfer. The descriptor is implemented as an
abstract data type. This is motivated by a simpler implementation so that a
data transfer descriptor can be stored and managed in the application rather
in the ARMCI library space. If a NULL value is passed to the argument
representing a handle (thus representing "implicit handle"), the function
does an implicit handle non-blocking transfer. A request data structure
embedded in the handle should not be copied in the application. Upon
completion of the data transfer, handle can be reused. A handle can be used
to represent multiple operations of the same type (i.e., all puts or all
gets). Such handle is an aggregate handle. Underneath, ARMCI combines multiple
requests and processes them as a single message (actually by calling
ARMCI_PutV/GetV/AccV). An explict handle should be initialized using the
following macro, before it is used in any non-blocking operation. It is
initialized as follows:
- ARMCI_INIT_HANDLE(armci_hdl_t* nb_handle)
Nonblocking operations in ARMCI allow user ot initiate a one-sided call and
then return control to the user program. The data transfer is completed
locally by calling a wait operation. Waiting on a nonblocking put operation
assures was injected into the network and the user buffer can be now reused.
Both in case of blocking and nonblocking store operations, to access the
modified data safely from other nodes programmer has to call an ARMCI_Fence
call first. ARMCI_Fence completes data transfers on the remote side. Unlike
the blocking operation, the nonblocking operations are NOT ordered.
|
