[mpich-discuss] Race condition in smpd?

[Dave Goodell]

I believe you can prevent smpd from modifying the host file by  
setting the following environment variable:  
SMPD_OPTION_NO_DYNAMIC_HOSTS=1.  Also, remove all lines from the  
~/.smpd file except for the passphrase line.

-Dave

On Oct 24, 2008, at 9:44 AM, John Fettig wrote:

> I'm trying to get "tight integration" of mpich2 going with rocks/sge,
> and am encountering the following problem.  When I launch the job on a
> couple of machines, everything works fine.  In ~/.smpd, I have
>
> phrase=somephrase
>
> Here, the home directory is NFS shared between the compute nodes.
>
> However, if I launch on much more than 2 machines, it seems there is a
> race to write to this file which causes it to be truncated.  This
> results in subsequent machines prompting for a phrase, and the job
> failing because they are waiting for user input.
>
> I have worked around this by assigning a phrase in the program that
> starts smpd for every job, however this is a hack and I would  
> rather let
> users set their own phrase.  Are you aware of such a problem?
>
> John
>