Remote Memory Access Programming in MPI-3

Abstract

The Message Passing Interface (MPI) 3.0 standard, introduced in September 2012, includes a significant update to the one-sided communication interface, also known as remote memory access (RMA). In particular, the interface has been extended to better support popular one-sided and global-address-space parallel programming models to provide better access to hardware performance features and enable new data-access modes. We present the new RMA interface and specify formal axiomatic models for data consistency and access semantics. Such models can help users reason about details of the semantics that are hard to extract from the English prose in the standard. It also fosters the development of tools and compilers, enabling them to automatically analyze, optimize, and debug RMA programs.