The bug was a race condition in the barrier operation that caused the barrier in MPI_Finalize to fail on very short programs.
Scalaiblity was improved by using the daemons to aggregate modex and barrier messages before sending them to the rank=0 proc. Improvement is proportional to ppn, of course, but there really wasn't a scaling problem at low ppn anyway. This modification also paves the way for better allgather operations since now all the data for each node is sitting at the daemon level, and the daemons are now aware that a collective operation on the OOB is underway (so they -can- participate in a collective of their own to support it).
Also added better diagnostics to map out the timing associated with MPI_Init - turned on by -mca orte_timing 1.
This commit was SVN r17988.
Specifically, add two new APIs:
1. lost_route: allows the OOB to report that a connection has failed, thereby giving the routed module an opportunity to respond appropriately to its topology. Creating the API also allows each routed component to hold its own definition of "lifeline" - in some cases, this may be a single connection, but in others it may be multiple connections. Some modules may choose to re-route messaging if the lifeline or any other connection is lost, while others may choose to abort the job.
Both the tree and unity modules retain the current behavior and abort the job if the lifeline connection is lost, while ignoring other lost connections.
2. get_wireup_info: returns (in a provided buffer) info required to wireup connections for the specified job. Some routed modules do not need to return any info as they can wireup via alternative means, while some need to xchg data with their peers. If info is inserted into the buffer, the plm_base_launch_apps function will xcast the contents to the specified job.
The commit also removes the "lifeline" entry from the orte_process_info struct (and the associated ORTE_PROC_MY_LIFELINE definition) as the lifeline info is now contained within the respective routed module.
This commit was SVN r17969.
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 commit adds definition for a "lifeline" connection. For an HNP, there is no lifeline, so the lifeline proc is NULL. For a daemon, the lifeline is the HNP - the daemon should abort if it loses that connection.
For a proc using unity routed, the lifeline is the HNP since it connects directly to the HNP.
For a proc using tree routed, the lifeline is the local daemon.
Adjusted OOB to call abort if the lifeline (as opposed to HNP) connection is lost.
This commit was SVN r17761.
1. taking advantage of the fact that we no longer create the launch message via a GPR trigger. In earlier times, we had the GPR create the launch message based on a subscription. In that mode of operation, we could not guarantee the order in which the data was stored in the message - hence, we had no choice but to parse the message in a loop that checked each value against a list of possible "keys" until the corresponding value was found.
Now, however, we construct the message "by hand", so we know precisely what data is in each location in the message. Thus, we no longer need to send the character string "keys" for each data value any more. This represents a rather large savings in the message size - to give you an example, we typically would use a 30-char "key" for a 2-byte data value. As you can see, the overhead can become very large.
2. sending node-specific data only once. Again, because we used to construct the message via subscriptions that were done on a per-proc basis, the data for each node (e.g., the daemon's name, whether or not the node was oversubscribed) would be included in the data for each proc. Thus, the node-specific data was repeated for every proc.
Now that we construct the message "by hand", there is no reason to do this any more. Instead, we can insert the data for a specific node only once, and then provide the per-proc data for that node. We therefore not only save all that extra data in the message, but we also only need to parse the per-node data once.
The savings become significant at scale. Here is a comparison between the revised trunk and the trunk prior to this commit (all data was taken on odin, using openib, 64 nodes, unity message routing, tested with application consisting of mpi_init/mpi_barrier/mpi_finalize, all execution times given in seconds, all launch message sizes in bytes):
Per-node scaling, taken at 1ppn:
#nodes original trunk revised trunk
time size time size
1 0.10 819 0.09 564
2 0.14 1070 0.14 677
3 0.15 1321 0.14 790
4 0.15 1572 0.15 903
8 0.17 2576 0.20 1355
16 0.25 4584 0.21 2259
32 0.28 8600 0.27 4067
64 0.50 16632 0.39 7683
Per-proc scaling, taken at 64 nodes
ppn original trunk revised trunk
time size time size
1 0.50 16669 0.40 7720
2 0.55 32733 0.54 11048
3 0.87 48797 0.81 14376
4 1.0 64861 0.85 17704
Condensing those numbers, it appears we gained:
per-node message size: 251 bytes/node -> 113 bytes/node
per-proc message size: 251 bytes/proc -> 52 bytes/proc
per-job message size: 568 bytes/job -> 399 bytes/job
(job-specific data such as jobid, override oversubscribe flag, total #procs in job, total slots allocated)
The fact that the two pre-commit trunk numbers are the same confirms the fact that each proc was containing the node data as well. It isn't quite the 10x message reduction I had hoped to get, but it is significant and gives much better scaling.
Note that the timing info was, as usual, pretty chaotic - the numbers cited here were typical across several runs taken after the initial one to avoid NFS file positioning influences.
Also note that this commit removes the orte_process_info.vpid_start field and the handful of places that passed that useless value. By definition, all jobs start at vpid=0, so all we were doing is passing "0" around. In fact, many places simply hardwired it to "0" anyway rather than deal with it.
This commit was SVN r16428.
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.
The default odls has been updated and works fine. The process odls has been updated, but I could not verify its operation. The bproc ODLS has not been updated yet. Ralph will look at it soon.
This commit was SVN r15257.
To be precise, given this hypothetical launching pattern:
host1: vpids 0, 2, 4, 6
host2: vpids 1, 3, 5, 7
The local_rank for these procs would be:
host1: vpids 0->local_rank 0, v2->lr1, v4->lr2, v6->lr3
host2: vpids 1->local_rank 0, v3->lr1, v5->lr2, v7->lr3
and the number of local procs on each node would be four. If vpid=0 then does a comm_spawn of one process on host1, the values of the parent job would remain unchanged. The local_rank of the child process would be 0 and its num_local_procs would be 1 since it is in a separate jobid.
I have verified this functionality for the rsh case - need to verify that slurm and other cases also get the right values. Some consolidation of common code is probably going to occur in the SDS components to make this simpler and more maintainable in the future.
This commit was SVN r14706.
Obviously, people like bproc will have to get the app_num via another avenue...but that's a problem for another day. Several options are easily available.
This commit was SVN r12788.
different macros, one for each project. Therefore, now we have OPAL_DECLSPEC,
ORTE_DECLSPEC and OMPI_DECLSPEC. Please use them based on the sub-project.
This commit was SVN r11270.
Clean up the remainder of the size_t references in the runtime itself. Convert to orte_std_cntr_t wherever it makes sense (only avoid those places where the actual memory size is referenced).
Remove the obsolete oob barrier function (we actually obsoleted it a long time ago - just never bothered to clean it up).
I have done my best to go through all the components and catch everything, even if I couldn't test compile them since I wasn't on that type of system. Still, I cannot guarantee that problems won't show up when you test this on specific systems. Usually, these will just show as "warning: comparison between signed and unsigned" notes which are easily fixed (just change a size_t to orte_std_cntr_t).
In some places, people didn't use size_t, but instead used some other variant (e.g., I found several places with uint32_t). I tried to catch all of them, but...
Once we get all the instances caught and fixed, this should once and for all resolve many of the heterogeneity problems.
This commit was SVN r11204.
- 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.
