On Oct 21, 2009, at 1:25 PM, George Bosilca wrote:

Brice,

Because MX doesn't provide a real RMA protocol, we created a fake one on top of point-to-point. The two peers have to agree on a unique tag, then the receiver posts it before the sender starts the send. However, as this is integrated with the real RMA protocol, where only one side knows about the completion of the RMA operation, we still exchange the ACK at the end. Therefore, the receiver doesn't need to know when the receive is completed, as it will get an ACK from the sender. At least this was the original idea.

But I can see how this might fails if the short ACK from the sender manage to pass the RMA operation on the wire. I was under the impression (based on the fact that MX respect the ordering) that the mx_send will trigger the completion only when all data is on the wire/nic memory so I supposed there is _absolutely_ no way for the ACK to bypass the last RMA fragments and to reach the receiver before the recv is really completed. If my supposition is not correct, then we should remove the mx_forget and make sure the that before we mark a fragment as completed we got both completions (the one from mx_recv and the remote one).

George,

When is the ACK sent? After the "PUT" completion returns (via mx_test(), etc) or simply after calling mx_isend() for the "PUT" but before the completion?

If the former, the ACK cannot pass the data. If the latter, it is easily possible especially if there is a lot of contention (and thus a lot of route dispersion).

MX only guarantees order of matching (two identical tags will match in order), not order of completion.

Scott

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