On Feb 1, 2013, at 9:59 PM, "Barrett, Brian W" <[email protected]> wrote:
> I don't think this is right either. Excluding a device that doesn't exist has
> many use cases. Such as disabling a network that only exists on part of the
> cluster. I'm not sure about what to do with seq; it's more like include than
> exclude.
Hmm. I've now given this quite a bit of thought. Here's what I think:
1. Just like there might be good reasons to exclude non-existent interfaces
(e.g., networks that only include on part of the cluster), the same argument
could be made for *including* non-existent interfaces.
2. It seems odd to me to have different behavior for non-existent interfaces
between include, exclude, and/or seq.
3. We have a very strong precedent throughout OMPI that if a human asks for
something that OMPI can't deliver, OMPI should error. According to this, and
according to the Law of Least Surprise, I would think that if I typo an exclude
interface name, OMPI should error and make a human figure it out.
4. If someone wants different includes/excludes in different parts of the
cluster, then they should have per-node values for these MCA params.
5. That being said, #4 is not always feasible. Concrete example (which is why
this whole thing started, incidentally): in my MTT cluster at Cisco, I have
*some* nodes with back-to-back interfaces. I can't think of a good way to have
per-node MCA params in an MTT run that is SLURM-queued and may end up on random
nodes in my cluster -- that may or may not include nodes with loopback
interfaces.
So how about this compromise:
If an invalid include, exclude, or if_seq interface is specified:
- If that interface is prefaced with "nowarn:", silently ignore that token
- Otherwise, display a show_help message and ignore the TCP BTL
For example:
mpirun --mca btl_tcp_if_include nowarn:eth5,eth6
- If eth5 doesn't exist, the job will continue just as if eth5 wasn't specified
- If eth6 doesn't exist, the TCP BTL will disqualify itself
(BTW: yes, I'm volunteering to code up whatever we agree on)
--
Jeff Squyres
[email protected]
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