To add to this, I would suggest not coupling processor affinity and
memory locality at the component level. At some level you do need
to tie these together, but there are other components that also need
to be considered, such as NIC locality, and probably other things
too ...
Rich
On Jul 18, 2005, at 8:50 AM, Matt Leininger wrote:
On Mon, 2005-07-18 at 08:28 -0400, Jeff Squyres wrote:
On Jul 18, 2005, at 2:50 AM, Matt Leininger wrote:
Generally speaking, if you launch <=N processes in a job on a node
(where N == number of CPUs on that node), then we set processor
affinity. We set each process's affinity to the CPU number
according
to the VPID ordering of the procs in that job on that node. So if
you
launch VPIDs 5, 6, 7, 8 on a node, 5 would go to processor 0, 6
would
go to processor 1, etc. (it's an easy, locally-determined ordering).
You'd need to be careful with dual-core cpus. Say you launch a 4
task MPI job on a 4-socket dual core Opteron. You'd want to schedule
the tasks on nodes 0, 2, 4, 6 - not 0, 1, 2, 3 to get maximum memory
bandwidth to each MPI task.
With the potential for non-trivial logic like this, perhaps the extra
work for a real framework would be justified, then.
I agree.
Also, how would this work with hybrid MPI+threading (either
pthreads
or OpenMP) applications? Let's say you have an 8 or 16 cpu node and
you
start up 2 MPI tasks with 4 compute threads in each task. The
optimum
layout may not be running the MPI tasks on cpu's 0 and 1. Several
hybrid applications that ran on ASC White and now Purple will have
these
requirements.
Hum. Good question. The MPI API doesn't really address this -- the
MPI API is not aware of additional threads that are created until you
call an MPI function (and even then, we're not currently checking
which
thread is calling -- that would just add latency).
What do these applications do right now? Do they set their own
processor / memory affinity? This might actually be outside the scope
of MPI...? (I'mm not trying to shrug off responsibility, but this
might be a case where the MPI simply doesn't have enough information,
and to get that information [e.g., via MPI attributes or MPI info
arguments] would be more hassle than the user just setting the
affinity
themselves...?)
We played around with setting processor affinity in our app a few
years ago. It got a little ugly, but things have improved since then.
I was thinking of having the app pass threading info to MPI (via info
or attributes). This might be outside the scope of MPI now, but this
should be the responsibility of the parallel programming
language/method. Making it the apps responsibility to set processor
affinity seems a bit too much of a low-level worry to put on
application
developers.
Some discussions around what a memory/processor affinity framework
should look like and be doing is a good starting point.
- Matt
_______________________________________________
devel mailing list
de...@open-mpi.org
http://www.open-mpi.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/devel
