[mpich-discuss] mpich2 does not work with SGE

tilakraj dattaram tilakraj1985 at gmail.com
Mon Jul 25 04:16:33 CDT 2011


Hi Reuti,

Thanks a lot for all your help.

Now we can run parallel jobs through the SGE (using a script file and
qsub). We submitted some test jobs and were keeping all the records
about the timings to compare the speeds with respect to mpirun
executed from the command line

For some reason (which I can't find out) running jobs through SGE is
much slower than the command line. Is it so that command line works
faster then the SGE ?

This is the comparison table,

CASE 1
=======
mpiexec (both mpiexec and mpirun point to the same link, i.e.
mpiexec.hydra) from command line with a hostfile

# mpiexec -f hostfile -np = n ./a.out<input
..................................................................................
16 cores per node

N cpus                   time (in secs)               speedup

    1                             262.27                         1
    2                             161.34                         1.63
    4                               82.41                         3.18
    8                               42.45                         6.18
   16                              33.56                         7.82
   24                              25.33                         10.35
   32                              20.38                         12.87
..................................................................................

CASE 2
=======
mpich2 integrated with SGE

mpirun executed from within the job script

This is our PE

pe_name            mpich2
slots              999
user_lists         NONE
xuser_lists        NONE
start_proc_args    NONE
stop_proc_args     NONE
allocation_rule    $fill_up
control_slaves     TRUE
job_is_first_task  FALSE
urgency_slots      min
accounting_summary FALSE

# qsub -q queue ./a.out<input>output (the PE is defined inside the
script file using the following option, #$ -pe mpich2 n)
.................................................................................
qsub [ 16 cores per node ]

N cpus                   time (in secs)                 speedup

   1                             383.5                             1
   2                             205.1                             1.87
   4                             174.3                             2.2
   8                             159.3                             2.4
  16                            123.2                             3.1
  24                            136.8                             2.8
  32                            124.6                             3.1
.................................................................................


As you can notice, the speed up is only about 3-times for a job run on
16 processors and submitted through the SGE interface, whereas it is
nearly 8-fold when the parallel jobs are submitted from the command
line using mpirun. Another thing to note is that speed nearly
saturates around 3 for SGE, whereas it keeps increasing to around 13
for 32 processors for command line execution. In fact, we had earlier
found that the speed up keeps increasing till about 144 processors,
where it gives a maximum speed up of about 20-fold over the serial
job.

Your help will be greatly appreciated!

Thank you

Regards
Tilak

> >
> > Message: 7
> > Date: Wed, 13 Jul 2011 12:30:18 +0200
> > From: Reuti <reuti at staff.uni-marburg.de>
> > Subject: Re: [mpich-discuss] mpich2 does not work with SGE
> > To: mpich-discuss at mcs.anl.gov
> > Message-ID:
> >        <33B507D9-C8E7-4F10-89E9-942633D81547 at staff.uni-marburg.de>
> > Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii
> >
> > Hi,
> >
> > Am 13.07.2011 um 12:13 schrieb tilakraj dattaram:
> >
> > > Hi Reuti
> > >
> > > Thanks for your reply. I forgot to mention in my previous message, but I had tried adding a Parallel Environment in SGE using qconf -ap. I did the following,
> > >
> > > qconf -Ap mpich
> >
> > `qconf -Ap mpich` is the command to add a parallel environment after you edited the configuration file already beforehand. This will then be stored in SGE's configuration. Editing it later on won't be honored. If you want to edit a configuration which is already stored in SGE, you can use:
> >
> > `qconf -mp mpich`
> >
> > or start form scratch after deleting the old one by:
> >
> > `qconf -ap mpich`
> >
> > To see a list of all PEs:
> >
> > `qconf -spl`
> >
> > Don't forget to add the PE to any of your queues by editing them with `qconf -mq all.q` or alike.
> >
> > General rule: uppercase commands will read configuration from files, while lowercase commands will open an editor for interactive setup.
> >
> >
> > > and then edited the pe file to,
> > >
> > > pe_name            mpich
> > > slots              999
> > > user_lists         NONE
> > > xuser_lists        NONE
> > > start_proc_args    NONE
> > > stop_proc_args    NONE
> > > allocation_rule    $fill_up
> > > control_slaves     TRUE
> > > job_is_first_task  FALSE
> > > urgency_slots      min
> > > accounting_summary FALSE
> > >
> > > This did not work. However, here I don't see how SGE would know where to look for mpich2/ hydra. I do see a mpi directory in the $SGE_ROOT directory, where there is rocks-mpich.template file that reads the following
> > >
> > > pe_name          mpich
> > > slots            9999
> > > user_lists       NONE
> > > xuser_lists      NONE
> > > start_proc_args  /opt/gridengine/mpi/startmpi.sh -catch_rsh $pe_hostfile
> > > stop_proc_args   /opt/gridengine/mpi/stopmpi.sh
> > > allocation_rule  $fill_up
> > > control_slaves   TRUE
> > > job_is_first_task FALSE
> > > urgency_slots     min
> > > accounting_summary TRUE
> >
> > This was for the old MPICH1. I don't know what ROCKS delivers, I would ignore it.
> >
> > SGE don't have to know anything about MPICH2. You only have to setup an appropriate PATH in your jobscript, so that you can access the `mpirun` of MPICH2 (and not one of any other MPI implementation) without the need of a hostlist and that's all. So, your jobscript will call `mpirun`, and a proper built MPICH2 will know about SGE and detect that it's running under SGE by checking some environment variables and then start processes on slave nodes by calling `qrsh -inherit ...` for the granted nodes.
> >
> > On the master node of the parallel job you can check the invocation chain by:
> >
> > `ps -e f`
> >
> > (f w/o -).
> >
> > -- Reuti
> >
> >
> > > Does SGE need re-configuration after the mpich2 install?
> > >
> > > Thanks in advance!
> > >
> > > Regards
> > > Tilak
> > >
> > > Message: 6
> > > Date: Tue, 12 Jul 2011 13:19:18 +0200
> > > From: Reuti <reuti at staff.uni-marburg.de>
> > > Subject: Re: [mpich-discuss] mpich2 does not work with SGE
> > > To: mpich-discuss at mcs.anl.gov
> > > Message-ID:
> > >        <8768BE3D-BE2D-498C-98A6-D3A72F397291 at staff.uni-marburg.de>
> > > Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii
> > >
> > > Hi,
> > >
> > > Am 12.07.2011 um 13:03 schrieb tilakraj dattaram:
> > >
> > > > We have a rocks cluster with 10 nodes, with sun grid engine installed and running. I then installed the most recent version of mpich2 (1.4) on the master and compute nodes. However, we are unable to run parallel jobs through SGE (we can submit serial jobs without a problem). I am a sge newbie, and most of the installation that we have done is by reading step-by-step tutorials on the web.
> > > >
> > > > The mpich2 manual says that hydra is the default process manager for mpich2, and I have checked that the mpiexec command points to mpiexec.hydra. Also, which mpicc, which mpiexec point to the desired location of mpich2. I understand that in this version of mpich2, hydra should be integrated with SGE by default. But maybe I am missing something here.
> > > >
> > > > We are able to run parallel jobs using command line by specifying a host file (e.g, mpiexec -f hostfile -np 16 ./a.out), but would like the resource manager to take care of allocating resources on the cluster.
> > >
> > > it's necessary to set up a so called parallel environment (i.e. a PE) in SGE and request it during the job submission. Then a plain mpirun without any hostfile or -np specification will do, as all is directly delivered by SGE. If all is set up in a proper way, you could even switch off `rsh` and `ssh` inside the cluster completely, as SGE's internal startup mechanism is used then to start processes on other nodes. In fact, disabling or limiting `ssh` to admin staff is a good way to check whether your parallel application has a tight integration into the queuingsystem where all slave processes are accounted also correctly and under full SGE control for a delition by `qdel`.
> > >
> > > For SGE there is also a mailing list: http://gridengine.org/mailman/listinfo/users
> > >
> > > -- Reuti
> > >
> > >
> > >
> > >
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