On 3/27/2011 2:26 AM, Michele Marena wrote:
Hi, My application performs good without shared memory utilization, but with shared memory I get performance worst than without of it. Do I make a mistake? Don't I pay attention to something? I know OpenMPI uses /tmp directory to allocate shared memory and it is in the local filesystem.
I guess you mean shared memory message passing. Among relevant parameters may be the message size where your implementation switches from cached copy to non-temporal (if you are on a platform where that terminology is used). If built with Intel compilers, for example, the copy may be performed by intel_fast_memcpy, with a default setting which uses non-temporal when the message exceeds about some preset size, e.g. 50% of smallest L2 cache for that architecture. A quick search for past posts seems to indicate that OpenMPI doesn't itself invoke non-temporal, but there appear to be several useful articles not connected with OpenMPI. In case guesses aren't sufficient, it's often necessary to profile (gprof, oprofile, Vtune, ....) to pin this down. If shared message slows your application down, the question is whether this is due to excessive eviction of data from cache; not a simple question, as most recent CPUs have 3 levels of cache, and your application may require more or less data which was in use prior to the message receipt, and may use immediately only a small piece of a large message.
-- Tim Prince
