After much work by Jeff and myself, and quite a lot of discussion, it has become clear that we simply cannot resolve the infinite loops caused by RML-involved subsystems calling orte_output. The original rationale for the change to orte_output has also been reduced by shifting the output of XML-formatted vs human readable messages to an alternative approach.
I have globally replaced the orte_output/ORTE_OUTPUT calls in the code base, as well as the corresponding .h file name. I have test compiled and run this on the various environments within my reach, so hopefully this will prove minimally disruptive.
This commit was SVN r18619.
such, the commit message back to the master SVN repository is fairly
long.
= ORTE Job-Level Output Messages =
Add two new interfaces that should be used for all new code throughout
the ORTE and OMPI layers (we already make the search-and-replace on
the existing ORTE / OMPI layers):
* orte_output(): (and corresponding friends ORTE_OUTPUT,
orte_output_verbose, etc.) This function sends the output directly
to the HNP for processing as part of a job-specific output
channel. It supports all the same outputs as opal_output()
(syslog, file, stdout, stderr), but for stdout/stderr, the output
is sent to the HNP for processing and output. More on this below.
* orte_show_help(): This function is a drop-in-replacement for
opal_show_help(), with two differences in functionality:
1. the rendered text help message output is sent to the HNP for
display (rather than outputting directly into the process' stderr
stream)
1. the HNP detects duplicate help messages and does not display them
(so that you don't see the same error message N times, once from
each of your N MPI processes); instead, it counts "new" instances
of the help message and displays a message every ~5 seconds when
there are new ones ("I got X new copies of the help message...")
opal_show_help and opal_output still exist, but they only output in
the current process. The intent for the new orte_* functions is that
they can apply job-level intelligence to the output. As such, we
recommend that all new ORTE and OMPI code use the new orte_*
functions, not thei opal_* functions.
=== New code ===
For ORTE and OMPI programmers, here's what you need to do differently
in new code:
* Do not include opal/util/show_help.h or opal/util/output.h.
Instead, include orte/util/output.h (this one header file has
declarations for both the orte_output() series of functions and
orte_show_help()).
* Effectively s/opal_output/orte_output/gi throughout your code.
Note that orte_output_open() takes a slightly different argument
list (as a way to pass data to the filtering stream -- see below),
so you if explicitly call opal_output_open(), you'll need to
slightly adapt to the new signature of orte_output_open().
* Literally s/opal_show_help/orte_show_help/. The function signature
is identical.
=== Notes ===
* orte_output'ing to stream 0 will do similar to what
opal_output'ing did, so leaving a hard-coded "0" as the first
argument is safe.
* For systems that do not use ORTE's RML or the HNP, the effect of
orte_output_* and orte_show_help will be identical to their opal
counterparts (the additional information passed to
orte_output_open() will be lost!). Indeed, the orte_* functions
simply become trivial wrappers to their opal_* counterparts. Note
that we have not tested this; the code is simple but it is quite
possible that we mucked something up.
= Filter Framework =
Messages sent view the new orte_* functions described above and
messages output via the IOF on the HNP will now optionally be passed
through a new "filter" framework before being output to
stdout/stderr. The "filter" OPAL MCA framework is intended to allow
preprocessing to messages before they are sent to their final
destinations. The first component that was written in the filter
framework was to create an XML stream, segregating all the messages
into different XML tags, etc. This will allow 3rd party tools to read
the stdout/stderr from the HNP and be able to know exactly what each
text message is (e.g., a help message, another OMPI infrastructure
message, stdout from the user process, stderr from the user process,
etc.).
Filtering is not active by default. Filter components must be
specifically requested, such as:
{{{
$ mpirun --mca filter xml ...
}}}
There can only be one filter component active.
= New MCA Parameters =
The new functionality described above introduces two new MCA
parameters:
* '''orte_base_help_aggregate''': Defaults to 1 (true), meaning that
help messages will be aggregated, as described above. If set to 0,
all help messages will be displayed, even if they are duplicates
(i.e., the original behavior).
* '''orte_base_show_output_recursions''': An MCA parameter to help
debug one of the known issues, described below. It is likely that
this MCA parameter will disappear before v1.3 final.
= Known Issues =
* The XML filter component is not complete. The current output from
this component is preliminary and not real XML. A bit more work
needs to be done to configure.m4 search for an appropriate XML
library/link it in/use it at run time.
* There are possible recursion loops in the orte_output() and
orte_show_help() functions -- e.g., if RML send calls orte_output()
or orte_show_help(). We have some ideas how to fix these, but
figured that it was ok to commit before feature freeze with known
issues. The code currently contains sub-optimal workarounds so
that this will not be a problem, but it would be good to actually
solve the problem rather than have hackish workarounds before v1.3 final.
This commit was SVN r18434.
Only one place used the user name field - session_dir, when formulating the name of the top-level directory. Accordingly, the code for getting the user's id has been moved to the session_dir code.
This commit was SVN r17926.
This has been a long-time problem. I tried to reduce the problem by having the orteds tell the HNP they were finalizing, and having the HNP wait until all orteds had reported or we timed out.
What was observed was that all the orteds were correctly reporting that they are leaving, but the HNP is able to exit before the orteds, thus closing the orteds lifeline socket and generating the error output. This is caused by the fact that the orteds have to whack all remaining session directories, which includes that blasted monster shared memory file! Cleaning up the SM file can take quite a while.
The HNP doesn't have that problem as there is no SM file there! So it gets out first.
What we had done in the past to resolve that problem was put a little test in the OOB that checks to see if we are finalizing. If we are, then we ignore the lifeline connection being lost. That check was still in the code - however, we had lost the line in orte_finalize that set the flag!!
This commit was SVN r17893.
Fix race conditions in abnormal terminations. We had done a first-cut at this in a prior commit. However, the window remained partially open due to the fact that the HNP has multiple paths leading to orte_finalize. Most of our frameworks don't care if they are finalized more than once, but one of them does, which meant we segfaulted if orte_finalize got called more than once. Besides, we really shouldn't be doing that anyway.
So we now introduce a set of atomic locks that prevent us from multiply calling abort, attempting to call orte_finalize, etc. My initial tests indicate this is working cleanly, but since it is a race condition issue, more testing will have to be done before we know for sure that this problem has been licked.
Also, some updates relevant to the tool comm library snuck in here. Since those also touched the orted code (as did the prior changes), I didn't want to attempt to separate them out - besides, they are coming in soon anyway. More on them later as that functionality approaches completion.
This commit was SVN r17843.
The commit has been tested for C/R and Cray operations, and on Odin (SLURM, rsh) and RoadRunner (TM). I tried to update all environments, but obviously could not test them. I know that Windows needs some work, and have highlighted what is know to be needed in the odls process component.
This represents a lot of work by Brian, Tim P, Josh, and myself, with much advice from Jeff and others. For posterity, I have appended a copy of the email describing the work that was done:
As we have repeatedly noted, the modex operation in MPI_Init is the single greatest consumer of time during startup. To-date, we have executed that operation as an ORTE stage gate that held the process until a startup message containing all required modex (and OOB contact info - see #3 below) info could be sent to it. Each process would send its data to the HNP's registry, which assembled and sent the message when all processes had reported in.
In addition, ORTE had taken responsibility for monitoring process status as it progressed through a series of "stage gates". The process reported its status at each gate, and ORTE would then send a "release" message once all procs had reported in.
The incoming changes revamp these procedures in three ways:
1. eliminating the ORTE stage gate system and cleanly delineating responsibility between the OMPI and ORTE layers for MPI init/finalize. The modex stage gate (STG1) has been replaced by a collective operation in the modex itself that performs an allgather on the required modex info. The allgather is implemented using the orte_grpcomm framework since the BTL's are not active at that point. At the moment, the grpcomm framework only has a "basic" component analogous to OMPI's "basic" coll framework - I would recommend that the MPI team create additional, more advanced components to improve performance of this step.
The other stage gates have been replaced by orte_grpcomm barrier functions. We tried to use MPI barriers instead (since the BTL's are active at that point), but - as we discussed on the telecon - these are not currently true barriers so the job would hang when we fell through while messages were still in process. Note that the grpcomm barrier doesn't actually resolve that problem, but Brian has pointed out that we are unlikely to ever see it violated. Again, you might want to spend a little time on an advanced barrier algorithm as the one in "basic" is very simplistic.
Summarizing this change: ORTE no longer tracks process state nor has direct responsibility for synchronizing jobs. This is now done via collective operations within the MPI layer, albeit using ORTE collective communication services. I -strongly- urge the MPI team to implement advanced collective algorithms to improve the performance of this critical procedure.
2. reducing the volume of data exchanged during modex. Data in the modex consisted of the process name, the name of the node where that process is located (expressed as a string), plus a string representation of all contact info. The nodename was required in order for the modex to determine if the process was local or not - in addition, some people like to have it to print pretty error messages when a connection failed.
The size of this data has been reduced in three ways:
(a) reducing the size of the process name itself. The process name consisted of two 32-bit fields for the jobid and vpid. This is far larger than any current system, or system likely to exist in the near future, can support. Accordingly, the default size of these fields has been reduced to 16-bits, which means you can have 32k procs in each of 32k jobs. Since the daemons must have a vpid, and we require one daemon/node, this also restricts the default configuration to 32k nodes.
To support any future "mega-clusters", a configuration option --enable-jumbo-apps has been added. This option increases the jobid and vpid field sizes to 32-bits. Someday, if necessary, someone can add yet another option to increase them to 64-bits, I suppose.
(b) replacing the string nodename with an integer nodeid. Since we have one daemon/node, the nodeid corresponds to the local daemon's vpid. This replaces an often lengthy string with only 2 (or at most 4) bytes, a substantial reduction.
(c) when the mca param requesting that nodenames be sent to support pretty error messages, a second mca param is now used to request FQDN - otherwise, the domain name is stripped (by default) from the message to save space. If someone wants to combine those into a single param somehow (perhaps with an argument?), they are welcome to do so - I didn't want to alter what people are already using.
While these may seem like small savings, they actually amount to a significant impact when aggregated across the entire modex operation. Since every proc must receive the modex data regardless of the collective used to send it, just reducing the size of the process name removes nearly 400MBytes of communication from a 32k proc job (admittedly, much of this comm may occur in parallel). So it does add up pretty quickly.
3. routing RML messages to reduce connections. The default messaging system remains point-to-point - i.e., each proc opens a socket to every proc it communicates with and sends its messages directly. A new option uses the orteds as routers - i.e., each proc only opens a single socket to its local orted. All messages are sent from the proc to the orted, which forwards the message to the orted on the node where the intended recipient proc is located - that orted then forwards the message to its local proc (the recipient). This greatly reduces the connection storm we have encountered during startup.
It also has the benefit of removing the sharing of every proc's OOB contact with every other proc. The orted routing tables are populated during launch since every orted gets a map of where every proc is being placed. Each proc, therefore, only needs to know the contact info for its local daemon, which is passed in via the environment when the proc is fork/exec'd by the daemon. This alone removes ~50 bytes/process of communication that was in the current STG1 startup message - so for our 32k proc job, this saves us roughly 32k*50 = 1.6MBytes sent to 32k procs = 51GBytes of messaging.
Note that you can use the new routing method by specifying -mca routed tree - if you so desire. This mode will become the default at some point in the future.
There are a few minor additional changes in the commit that I'll just note in passing:
* propagation of command line mca params to the orteds - fixes ticket #1073. See note there for details.
* requiring of "finalize" prior to "exit" for MPI procs - fixes ticket #1144. See note there for details.
* cleanup of some stale header files
This commit was SVN r16364.
completed successfully, Bad Things(tm) could happen.
* Now we explicitly check orte_initialized (a new global in ORTE
indicating whether we are between orte_init() and orte_finalize()
or not), and if so, react accordingly.
* If ORTE is initialized, use orte_system_info.nodename; otherwise,
use gethostname().
* Add loop protection to ensure that ompi_mpi_abort() is not invoked
multiple times recursively.
This commit was SVN r13354.
- move files out of toplevel include/ and etc/, moving it into the
sub-projects
- rather than including config headers with <project>/include,
have them as <project>
- require all headers to be included with a project prefix, with
the exception of the config headers ({opal,orte,ompi}_config.h
mpi.h, and mpif.h)
This commit was SVN r8985.
CTRL-C'd.
We were calling orte_finalize recursively which caused a segv when it tried to
use a freed framework (orte_rmgr in this case).
I added a status flag to orte_universe_info to indicate where we are in the code.
This was needed to determine if we should call orte_abort or not when shutting
down in the tcp oob.
This commit was SVN r7160.
