Re: we should wait for 1sided implementations

Dennis Cottel (dennis@rats-b.nosc.mil)
Mon, 3 Jun 96 11:27:46 PDT

Eric says,
> But in the specific case of data alignment I still don't see the
> problem. Let's say just for the sake of argument that Hell freezes over
> and we actually do vote to require all data chunks to be 64-bit aligned.

I've been resisting commenting on this discussion since my experience is
entirely with message passing rather than get/put style communication.
But from a user's point of view, requiring all the put/get operations to
be X-bit aligned (for any X) is a terrible idea. What about the new
128-bit chip architectures which will no doubt be announced soon? What
about machines with 256-bit cache lines?

> This is trivial for both users and implementations to check.

Fooey. I shouldn't have to.
--Dennis

Dennis Cottel, dennis@nosc.mil, (619) 553-1645
NCCOSC, RDT&E Division (NRaD), San Diego, CA