Meeting 2025 04 10

• Date: April 10, 2025

• Time: 11 am - Noon US Central Daylight Time

• Location: Virtual Meeting. Zoom information: https://pmix.org/captcha/

• Active Notes Link: Google Doc - Please add your name and affiliation.

• Upcoming meetings

ASC 25Q2: May 6, 8
ASC 25Q3: July 15, 17
ASC 25Q4: Oct 14, 16

Next PMIx ASC Monthly Meeting:
 * June 12, 2025

Agenda

Administrative

• Open Positions: Secretary seat is available

Ongoing work

• PMIx 5.1 vs 6.0 discussion announcement
• Active PRs:
  • Errata PR prep for ASC 25Q2: PR#516
• Active issues:
• Elevation to stable: review and decide on new Fns/attrs Issue#518
• Formatting issue for provisionals: Issue#519
• Publication of examples: Issue#515
• Decide if "These errors cannot be detected during packing" require further attention Issue#507
• Decide if deprecating PMIX_NUM_SLOTS attribute Issue#369
• Open Discussions

Attendance

Person	Institution
Ralph Castain	self
Thomas Naughton	ORNL
Isaias Compres	TUM
Howard Pritchard	LANL
Ken Raffenetti	ANL
Norbert Eicker	JSC

Notes

• Clarify what the v5.1 vs v6.0 should contain related to provisional promotion

  • Is the v5.1 standard to be v6.0 to enable elevation to from provisional to stable?
  • Review the governance to determine requirement (may need to be v6.0)
  • Much of the ticket https://github.com/pmix/pmix-standard/issues/518 are drifts

• Discussion about the focus of PMIx Standard long-term agenda

  • V5.1 / v6.0 provisional move
  • Examples
  • Clarifications to standard

• Propose a stable point to solidify the APIs that are to be supported and what is to be covered by the library.

  • Possibly follow path MPI Forum did where stay at mpi-3 for a long while and no need to make changes at the standard level
  • Then later can refine/extend as needed
  • Consider this discussion at the quarterly meeting
  • Q: What other things (e.g., "promote provisionals") are need to get to this stable point?
  • Part of slowness could be that Standard has all needed, with focus now shifting to community efforts for adding support (library/implementation).
  • Example: There seem to be more interest on the implementation side judging from the growth and tone of questions lately. The support questions are moving beyond just wire-up, and now are often more elaborate/specific, e.g., group construction, tools, etc.
  • The gist being what effort is needed at the PMIx Standard level vs. implementation level?
  • Example: Recent work on pmix lock raised some questions that may need clarification.

• Q: Where should we go and how should we proceed?

  • Do we want to convene groups for changes or have more agile changes in the standard? Question mainly about response time.
  • Much of the question is coming from reduced participation

• Need a PR for provisional elevation issue #518 (Ralph volunteered)

  • Thomas will ping Aurelien to make sure he does not have something pending to avoid duplication

• Thomas - Move the pmix-examples to main pmix-standard repo

• Ralph - good to have example on how to write a PMIx server, which could be useful to have small example to help clarify orderings for sequential APIs to better understand sequencing. Maybe add to the working group examples.

• Isaias - working group has been working on the scheduler that would support subset needed for queueing, and responses for users, etc. Maybe a small example would be useful for a scheduler that would support PMIx requests.

• Once we have the C examples, possibly also support Pythonic version of things.

Todos

• add "roadmap/planning" discussion topic to May ASC quarterly agenda
• move pmix-example to pmix-standard repo

Prior todos

• Discussion on elevation to stable: we didn’t have critical mass to do a full decision pass on #518, it’ll come back next monthly
• We have two different types of provisional markers in master:
  • TODO: create tracking issue PR#519
  • TODO: verify which of the two styles we used in v3 and has historical precedence v4.1 is the first version with provisionals; We have used different formatting for provisionals in v4.1, v4.2, and v5.0