[petsc-dev] Adding support memkind allocators in PETSc

[Richard Mills]

On Wed, Apr 29, 2015 at 11:10 PM, Richard Mills <rtm at utk.edu> wrote:

> On Wed, Apr 29, 2015 at 1:28 PM, Barry Smith <bsmith at mcs.anl.gov> wrote:
>
>>
>>   Forget about the issue of "changing" PetscMallocN() or adding a new
>> interface instead, that is a minor syntax and annoyance issue:
>>
>>   The question is "is it worth exploring adding a context for certain
>> memory allocations that would allow us to "do" various things to the memory
>> and "indicate" properties of the memory"? I think, though I agree with Jed
>> that it could be fraught with difficulties, that is is worthwhile playing
>> around with this.
>>
>>   Barry
>>
>>
> I vote "yes".  One might want to, say
>
> * Give hints via something like madvise() on how/when the memory might be
> accessed.
> * Specify a preferred "kind" of memory (and behavior if the preferred kind
> is not available, or perhaps even specify a priority on how hard to try to
> get the preferred memory kind)
> * Specify something like a preference to interleave allocation blocks
> between different kinds of memory
>

Let me add to the list of things we might want to do:

  * Specify that "huge pages" be used.

--Richard


> I'm sure we can come up with plenty of other possibilities, some of which
> might actually be useful, many of which will be useful only for very
> contrived cases, and some that are not useful today but may become useful
> as memory systems evolve.
>
> --Richard
>
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