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authorArtemy Kovalyov <artemyko@mellanox.com>2017-08-17 15:52:12 +0300
committerDoug Ledford <dledford@redhat.com>2017-08-29 08:30:21 -0400
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Documentation: Hardware tag matching
Add document providing definitions of terms and core explanations for tag matching (TM) protocols, eager and rendezvous, TM application header, tag list manipulations and matching process. Signed-off-by: Artemy Kovalyov <artemyko@mellanox.com> Signed-off-by: Leon Romanovsky <leon@kernel.org> Signed-off-by: Doug Ledford <dledford@redhat.com>
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+Tag matching logic
+
+The MPI standard defines a set of rules, known as tag-matching, for matching
+source send operations to destination receives. The following parameters must
+match the following source and destination parameters:
+* Communicator
+* User tag - wild card may be specified by the receiver
+* Source rank – wild car may be specified by the receiver
+* Destination rank – wild
+The ordering rules require that when more than one pair of send and receive
+message envelopes may match, the pair that includes the earliest posted-send
+and the earliest posted-receive is the pair that must be used to satisfy the
+matching operation. However, this doesn’t imply that tags are consumed in
+the order they are created, e.g., a later generated tag may be consumed, if
+earlier tags can’t be used to satisfy the matching rules.
+
+When a message is sent from the sender to the receiver, the communication
+library may attempt to process the operation either after or before the
+corresponding matching receive is posted. If a matching receive is posted,
+this is an expected message, otherwise it is called an unexpected message.
+Implementations frequently use different matching schemes for these two
+different matching instances.
+
+To keep MPI library memory footprint down, MPI implementations typically use
+two different protocols for this purpose:
+
+1. The Eager protocol- the complete message is sent when the send is
+processed by the sender. A completion send is received in the send_cq
+notifying that the buffer can be reused.
+
+2. The Rendezvous Protocol - the sender sends the tag-matching header,
+and perhaps a portion of data when first notifying the receiver. When the
+corresponding buffer is posted, the responder will use the information from
+the header to initiate an RDMA READ operation directly to the matching buffer.
+A fin message needs to be received in order for the buffer to be reused.
+
+Tag matching implementation
+
+There are two types of matching objects used, the posted receive list and the
+unexpected message list. The application posts receive buffers through calls
+to the MPI receive routines in the posted receive list and posts send messages
+using the MPI send routines. The head of the posted receive list may be
+maintained by the hardware, with the software expected to shadow this list.
+
+When send is initiated and arrives at the receive side, if there is no
+pre-posted receive for this arriving message, it is passed to the software and
+placed in the unexpected message list. Otherwise the match is processed,
+including rendezvous processing, if appropriate, delivering the data to the
+specified receive buffer. This allows overlapping receive-side MPI tag
+matching with computation.
+
+When a receive-message is posted, the communication library will first check
+the software unexpected message list for a matching receive. If a match is
+found, data is delivered to the user buffer, using a software controlled
+protocol. The UCX implementation uses either an eager or rendezvous protocol,
+depending on data size. If no match is found, the entire pre-posted receive
+list is maintained by the hardware, and there is space to add one more
+pre-posted receive to this list, this receive is passed to the hardware.
+Software is expected to shadow this list, to help with processing MPI cancel
+operations. In addition, because hardware and software are not expected to be
+tightly synchronized with respect to the tag-matching operation, this shadow
+list is used to detect the case that a pre-posted receive is passed to the
+hardware, as the matching unexpected message is being passed from the hardware
+to the software.