I am no expert here, and i don't know the specific
requirements for your problem, but wouldn't it make sense to
have 2 "master" processes? One which deals out the jobs,
and one which collects the results?
Jody
On Fri, Jun 5, 2009 at 1:58 AM, Lars Andersson<lars...@gmail.com> wrote:
>>> I've been trying to get overlapping computation and data transfer to
>>> work, without much success so far.
>>
>> If this is so important to you, why do you insist in using Ethernet
>> and not a more HPC-oriented interconnect which can make progress in
>> the background ?
>
> We have a medium sized cluster connected using ethernet that works
> pretty well for most of our workloads, and we don't have the resources
> to simply buy whatever hardware would be more optimal.
>
> For most parts of our application, we either have huge data transfers
> that can't benefit much from simultaneous computation/overlap, or
> small, frequent message passing that works well with the busy-waiting
> nature or Open MPI.
>
> However, we are now investigating a problem that would benefit from
> (or at least be much easier to implement) if we were able to overlap
> local computation with medium sized message transfers (1-10MB). In
> short, the problem is having a master decoding image frames and
> sending them around to a number of processing slaves, as well as
> collecting resulting output for each frame from the slaves.
>
> Since my first post, I've been searching a bit more and found the
> "--enable-progress-threads" Open MPI build option. I've tried it
> (using Open MPI 1.3.2), but it doesn't seem to make any difference.
> Should it?
>
>
> So, what is my best bet?
>
> 1) Spawning a thread doing MPI_Wait() while doing the local work in
> the main thread.
>
>
> 2) Spawning a thread doing something like
>
> while(!done)
> {
> usleep(1000);
> for each request
> {
> MPI_Test();
> }
>
> What amount of sleep would you recommend here?
>
>
> 3) Trying to intersperse my local computation with MPI_Test() calls?
>
>
>
> I don't really like solution 3 because most of the local work is being
> done in external library code, which means it's going to be hard/ugly
> to intersperse it with MPI calls.
>
> I'd really appreciate if someone with experience could comment on
> this. I hope my problem is clear. How would you solve it?
>
> Thanks,
>
> Lars
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