Meeting 2021 11 11

Agenda

• Next Meetings and Deadlines

  • PMIx ASC Monthly Meeting: Thursday, Dec. 9
  • PMIX ASC Quarterly Meeting Feb 15 and 17, 2022

• PMIx v4 Release Update (Ralph/Josh)

  • v4.2 planned for Mid/Late 2022 (as needed)

• PMIx v5 Release Update (Ken/Dave)

• Working Group Updates:

  • Implementation agnostic document: Dave Solt
  • Tools: Isaías A. Comprés
  • Dynamic workflows: Justin Wozniak

• PMIx Standard: Open GitHub Issues and PRs

  • https://github.com/pmix/pmix-standard/issues
    • https://github.com/pmix/pmix-standard/pull/350
    • Dave needs to address comment before it can be merged
  • https://github.com/pmix/pmix-standard/pulls

• PMIx Governance: Open GitHub Issues and PRs

  • https://github.com/pmix/governance/issues
  • https://github.com/pmix/governance/pulls

• ABI Discussion (Ken)

  • https://github.com/pmix/pmix-standard/issues/366
  • https://github.com/pmix/pmix-standard/issues/367
  • https://github.com/pmix/pmix-standard/issues/364

Attendance

Person	Institution
Kathryn Mohror	LLNL
Josh Hursey	IBM
Michael Karo	Altair
Aurelien Bouteiller	UTK
Isaias Compres	TUM
Dave Solt	IBM
Ken Raffenetti	ANL
Ralph Castain	Nanook
Thomas Naughton	ORNL

Notes

• PMIx v4

  • 4.0 Released, probably release v4.1 soon with few errata

• PMIx v5

  • Decided that ABI is gating feature for v5
  • Tentative mid next year (2022)
  • Weekly discussions during Implementation Agnostic WG on Mondays

• Working Group updates

  • IA (Dave)
    • Much of focus has been on readability/presentation improvements
    • Up to query chapter now (recent discussions w/ Ralph)
    • Trying to push through to be ready to focus on ABI work
  • Tools (Isaias)
    • Plan to move to monthly meeting to explore use-cases identified during initial brainstorming efforts
    • Malleability, Allocation metadata (transactions)
    • Support for containers
  • Dynamic (Justin)
    • No update today

• Open Issues and PRs

  • https://github.com/pmix/pmix-standard/pull/350
  • Missed a revision exception change, needs to be updated then merged

• Procedure PRs

  • No PR opened yet but 2 topics in the work
  • Change requirement that major releases must be voted in face to face meeting, should not specify f2f or vritual (lead Ken)
  • Change requirement that major text changes that are non-semantic in nature cannot be rolled into minor releases (lead Aurelien)

• ABI Discussion

  • Question about string attributes in the header file
  • Are string attributes part of the ABI?
  • An implementation is allowed to return ‘not supported’ if string attributes are added/removed
  • String values are standardized, but not required to be supported at the impl. Level, thus software releases may still have them come and go between releases, yet this does not change the linking properties of hte library (thus the ABI)
  • Having to educate users about the fine line between compile time compatibility and ABI compatibility may be difficult (thus advocating for making them part of ABI, despite it not being strictly required)
  • ABI inclusion would force a minor bump for every addition, major bump for every deletion, this can cause additional work for packagers (due to unnecessary ABI updates causing stuff to need recompiling)
  • The issue is still undecided more discussion needed
  • Same thing about macros: they are not link-level dependencies, need to create an issue to track discussion about them in the same way we do for string constants