Remote communication

Sometimes during the course of local communication, it's necessary to send or receive messages outside of the local neighborhood. For example in particle tracing, a local algorithm that exchanges particles as they cross neighboring block boundaries, the block containing a particle's final destination may need to send summary statistics carried along by the particle (such as total number of hops) back to the originating block where the particle began its journey. For such cases, there is a remote version of diy::Master::exchange().

Synchronous remote rexchange

Everything follows the synchronous exchange protocol of the Local communication page, except that a remote flag set to true is passed to master.exchange, and the master.foreach() callback functions can access blocks outside of their neighborhood. When enqueuing data remotely, DIY doesn't know the assignment of block global ID (gid) to MPI process rank; this information is only kept for the local link. Hence, the full diy::BlockID information (a tuple of block gid and MPI process rank) must be provided by the user. For dequeuing, nothing changes when receiving remote messages. Messages arrive over the link, and their gid is known just as if the source were local.

void foo(Block* b,                             // local block
         const diy::Master::ProxyWithLink& cp) // communication proxy for neighbor blocks
{
    diy::Link*    l = cp.link();                     // link to the neighbor blocks

    // compute some local value
    ...

    // for all neighbor blocks, enqueue data going to this neighbor block in the next exchange
    for (int i = 0; i < l->size(); ++i)
        cp.enqueue(l->target(i), value);

    // enqueue something remote outside of the neighborhood
    int dest_gid = ...;                         // block global ID of destination
    int dest_proc = ...;                        // MPI process of destination block
    diy::BlockID dest_block = {dest_gid, dest_proc};
    cp.enqueue(dest_block, value);
}

void bar(Block* b,                             // local block
         const diy::Master::ProxyWithLink& cp) // communication proxy for neighbor blocks
{
    diy::Link*    l = cp.link();

    // for all neighbor blocks, dequeue data received from this neighbor block in the last exchange
    for (int i = 0; i < l.size(); ++i)
    {
        int v;
        cp.dequeue(l->target(i).gid, v);
    }

    // compute some local value
    ...
}

int main(int argc, char**argv)
{
  ...

  bool remote = true;
  master.foreach(&foo);
  master.exchange(remote);
  master.foreach(&bar);
}