[MPICH2-dev] mpd client library and protocol?

[Rajeev Thakur]

Greg,
     What exactly are you trying to do? That might help us figure out what
might be your best option. I am attaching the document describing the PMI
interface. We use use PMI to *implement* MPI. You seem to want to control
MPI program. Is that right?

Rajeev



On Wed, 17 May 2006, Greg Watson wrote:

> Bill,
>
> I'm not sure, since I still don't really understand the architecture.
> Can I use PMI to launch and control an MPI program on a cluster? Or
> is that something that will be available in the future? I would
> rather not have to provide a different program for each process
> manager, but cluster support is also essential.
>
> Any information or documentation you can provide on the architecture
> and APIs would be appreciated.
>
> Greg
>
>
> On May 16, 2006, at 10:21 PM, William Gropp wrote:
>
> > At 11:15 PM 5/16/2006, Greg Watson wrote:
> >> Rajeev,
> >>
> >> Many thanks for your reply. Can you suggest the best approach if I
> >> want to write a C program to control mpd? At a minimum, I'd like to
> >> be able to spawn/terminate an MPI job using a C program. Is PMI what
> >> I'd use to do this?
> >>
> >> Any documentation you could provide would be appreciated.
> >
> > An alternative is to not use MPD at all and to use the PMI
> > interface.  A C example of this is the "gforker" process manager;
> > this is built using a set of utility routines in mpich2/src/pm/util
> > that provide the "other" side of the simple PMI interface.  gforker
> > implements all of the PM functions, including spawning MPI jobs.
> > Let me know if this is the direction in which you are interested.
> >
> > Bill
> >
> >
> >> Thanks,
> >>
> >> Greg
> >>
> >> On May 16, 2006, at 7:56 PM, Rajeev Thakur wrote:
> >>
> >>> Greg,
> >>>
> >>>> I assume that mpdlib.py is a client library that other applications
> >>>> (i.e. other than mpiexec) could potentially use to communicate with
> >>>> and/or control mpd.
> >>>>
> >>>> 1. Is there any API documentation?
> >>>
> >>> The API is the Process Manager Interface (PMI), which is the
> >>> interface
> >>> MPICH2 uses for interacting with process managers. There is some
> >>> documentation for it, which I could send you if you like (it may
> >>> not be 100%
> >>> up to date).
> >>>
> >>>> 2. Is there a C version of the client library?
> >>>
> >>> The PMI library is in C. It is implemented in src/pmi/simple/
> >>> simple_pmi.c.
> >>>
> >>>> 3. Is the mpd protocol documented anywhere?
> >>>
> >>> Not currently, but the plan is to :-).
> >>>
> >>>> 4. Is the protocol used by mpd the same as that used by smpd?
> >>>
> >>> No, they are different.
> >>>
> >>> Rajeev
> >
> > William Gropp
> > http://www.mcs.anl.gov/~gropp
>
>
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