On Mon, 2007-08-27 at 15:10 -0400, Rolf vandeVaart wrote: > We are running into a problem when running on one of our larger SMPs > using the latest Open MPI v1.2 branch. We are trying to run a job > with np=128 within a single node. We are seeing the following error: > > "SM failed to send message due to shortage of shared memory." > > We then increased the allowable maximum size of the shared segment to > 2Gigabytes-1 which is the maximum allowed on 32-bit application. We > used the mca parameter to increase it as shown here. > > -mca mpool_sm_max_size 2147483647 > > This allowed the program to run to completion. Therefore, we would > like to increase the default maximum from 512Mbytes to 2G-1 Gigabytes. > Does anyone have an objection to this change? Soon we are going to > have larger CPU counts and would like to increase the odds that things > work "out of the box" on these large SMPs. >
There is a serious problem with the 1.2 branch, it does not allocate any SM area for each process at the beginning. SM areas are allocated on demand and if some of the processes are more aggressive than the others, it will cause starvation. This problem is fixed in the trunk by assign at least one SM area for each process. I think this is what you saw (starvation) and an increase of max size may not be necessary. Ollie
