Simon Köstlin wrote:
I'm new to MPI and I've got a question about blocking routines like the Send-, Wait-Function and so on. I wrote a parallel program that uses the blocking Send and the Nonblocking Isend function. Now my question: If I'm sending something with the blocking Send function it should block the process until the other process received the message.
No. MPI_Send returns once the message has been taken out of the user's send buffer. The receiving process might not yet have received the message. The MPI implementation could have buffered the message somewhere, and for short messages it probably did. To ensure sync with receiver, use MPI_Ssend.
I think that works so far. But I'm also sending a message to the process itself and my programm doesn't block.
You're lucky. To send to yourself, it's safest to use nonblocking operations such as MPI_Irecv/MPI_Send/MPI_Wait (where you wait on the receive). If you MPI_Send to yourself but there is no receive posted, an MPI implementation could lock up on you.
So does MPI not block if I'm sending a message to the same process from which I'm sending the message and it is a blocking routine?
That's implementation dependent.
The same happens if I'm sending with a non-blocking Isend and do a request.Wait() on the send request after each send operation. So it doesn't block if I'm sending the message to itself. I'm wondering about that because the Recv function will occur only after all messages have been sent. It's ok that it works, because I need to send a message to the process itself for simplicity. I'm only wondering why this works.
If the receives are posted only after all the sends, you're relying on the MPI implementation buffering everything up somewhere. That behavior is implementation dependent, and typically shorter messages can be buffered but longer messages will induce sync with the receiver. If you *really* want to hold off on Recv operations, you might have to buffer messages yourself with MPI_Bsend. But the generally recommended pattern is to post MPI_Irecv requests as soon as possible and then post your sends.
Another question I have is about a memory leak. I got a heavy memory leak if I did not a request.Wait() on the send request before the Isend function and didn't wait until the last Isend operation completed. But all messages were arrived if I do the request.Wait() or not. Now I'm doing a request.Wait() before each Isend function and my memory isn't increasing much, but still a bit. Do I have to do something else on the blocking Send function? And is there a function in MPI to clean up its buffers in a running application without using the Finalize function.
Doesn't sound right to me, but someone else may understand this better.
