WHAT: Rename --enable-mpi-threads and ENABLE_MPI_THREADS to --enable-thread-safety and ENABLE_THREAD_SAFETY, respectively (--enable-mpi-threads will be maintained as a synonym to --enable-thread-safety for backwards compat, of course).
WHY: Other projects are starting to use ORTE and OPAL without OMPI. The fact that thread safety in OPAL and ORTE requires a configure switch with "mpi" in the name is very non-intuitive.
WHERE: A bunch of places in the code; see attached patch.
WHEN: Next Friday COB
TIMEOUT: COB, Friday, Feb 5, 2010
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More details:
Cisco is starting to investigate using ORTE and OPAL in various threading scenarios -- without the OMPI layer. The fact that you need to enable thread safety in ORTE/OPAL with a configure switch that has the word "mpi" in it is extremely counter-intuitive (it bit some of our engineers very badly, and they were mighty annoyed!!).
Since this functionality actually has nothing to do with MPI (it's actually the other way around -- MPI_THREAD_MULTIPLE needs this functionality), we really should rename this switch and the corresponding AC_DEFINE -- I suggest:
--enable|disable-thread-safety
ENABLE_THREAD_SAFETY
Of course, we need to keep the configure switch "--enable|disable-mpi-threads" for backwards compatibility, so that can be a synonym to --enable-thread-safety.
See the attached patch (the biggest change is in opal/config/opal_config_threads.m4). If there are no objections, I'll commit this next Friday COB.
--
Jeff Squyres
jsquyres_at_[hidden]
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