Meeting 2019 06 14

Agenda

• Readings: None
• Discussion of Standard vs Reference Implementation naming
  • https://groups.google.com/d/msg/hpc-runtime-wg/aTmL5KrmnJ4/XvxkCCVIBAAJ
  • https://groups.google.com/d/msg/hpc-runtime-wg/R_KNVWQyTyQ/su4MmT6xAQAJ
  • https://github.com/pmix/pmix-standard/wiki/Meeting-2019-03-29

Notes

        Joshua Hursey (IBM)
	Swaroop Pophale (ORNL)
	Bill Allcock (ANL)
	Geoffroy Vallee (Sylabs, Inc)
	Jithin Jose (Microsoft)
	David Solt (IBM)
	Kathryn Mohror (LLNL)
	Jim Garlick (LLNL)
	Artem Polyakov (Mellanox)
	Dmitry Dumov (Intel)
	Howard Prichard (LANL)
	Ken Raffenetti (ANL)
	Ralph Castain (Intel)
	Thomas Naughton (ORNL)
	Tom Scogland (LLNL)
	Aurelien Bouteiller (UTK)
	Stephen Herbein (LLNL)
	Sourav Chakraborty (Ohio)

• Discussion of Standard vs Reference Implementation naming
  • Problem Statement:
    • “PMIx Standard” Document
    • “PMIx” Reference Implementation
    • Equates PMIx Standard with a specific implementation.
  • Suggestion 1: Do nothing
  • Suggestion 2: Rename the Reference Implementation
    • Keep the output library (libpmix.so) the same across implementations
  • Suggestion 3: Rename the Standard start from PMIx interfaces
  • Suggestion 4: Start a new Standard from scratch
• Level set on the Problem statement:
  • Renaming encourages the participation of multiple implementations
  • Packaging: Allows for a meta package of “PMIx” with sub packages for different implementations. The reference implementation occupying that namespace makes it confusing.
  • Renaming does require work - let’s make sure there is a need here.
• API change example - PMIx_Get
  • Concern about the signature of the current PMIx_Get (with structure type)
  • Could we make a ‘new’ PMIx_Get (or change its signature) that addresses this concern.
  • PMix community welcomes it for discussion and is open to a new version. Just need to move carefully with existing APIs.
  • Suggested process:
    • Duplicate API, Deprecate old API (possibly maintain two versions)
• Moving forward suggestions:
  • Rename the reference implementation to “Open PMIx” as a symbolic move to demonstrate a community commitment to evolving the PMIx Standard in such a way that is not implementation specific.
  • Timeline for renaming needs to be discussed with PMIx Reference Implementation community. Will come back with a better idea of a timeline.
  • Working group exists on restructuring the document to be implementation agnostic. Moving towards standardization phrasing.

Action Items

• Folks should reflect on this direction and continue the conversation on the mailing list
• PMIx Reference Implementation community will discuss the suggested name change during next week's developer teleconf.