[petsc-users] Tough to reproduce petsctablefind error

[Mark McClure]

Hi, all.

I am emailing to close the loop on this.

There were two things combining to cause our issue.

1. At some point, several years ago, I had set
PetscPushErrorHandler(PetscAbortErrorHandler, NULL), and then forgotten
about it. This caused the program to terminate when an error was
encountered.

2. I believe our code had a very rare, nonreproducible bug (occurring once
every 1000s of hours of runtime) where it passed column and/or row values
to Petsc that were greater than the size of the matrix.

Having changed the error handler, and also put in a special error check to
check the column/row assignments and abort (and then rerun with smaller dt)
a timestep if they are out of range. Having done that, we've run for over a
month and have not seen the problem reproduce.

Two ideas that might be helpful to avoid this problem in the future:

1. When Petsc aborts with error because
PetscPushErrorHandler(PetscAbortErrorHandler, NULL) is set, it might be
helpful to add to the error message that is printed to cout. "Petsc is
aborting the program because the Petsc Error Handler has been set to abort
on errors. This can be changed by modifying the option passed into the
error handler." Otherwise, it might be unclear to a user why Petsc is
aborting (if abort on error is set, but they don't realize). We had written
error checks to catch errors passed out of Petsc and handle gracefully. But
had overlooked the error handler setting, and so were confused why this
error was causing the entire program to terminate. A bit more explanation
in the abort message could help avoid that kind of user confusion. I had
thought it was a hard crash out of Petsc, since I was confused why the
function wasn't returning.

2. When the "greater than largest key allowed" error is encountered, it
might be helpful to add to the warning message printed to users to
additionally say: "This error may occur if the column and row values passed
into Petsc are within the range from 0 to size of matrix." Not positive,
but I am about 90% sure that is why we were hitting the error.

Thank you again for your help. I really appreciate your rapid responses and
help!

Mark





On Sat, Sep 26, 2020 at 10:53 PM Mark McClure <mark at resfrac.com> wrote:

> Ok, I think we've made some progress.
>
> We were already calling the function like this: ierr = PetscCall(); if
> (ierr != 0) {do something to handle error}. We actually are doing that on
> every single call made to Petsc, just to be careful. This is what was
> confusing to me. Why was the program terminating from within Petsc and not
> returning out with an error? We'd written our code so that if Petsc did
> return with an error, we'd discard the full timestep, destroy all the Petsc
> data structures and redo everything with a smaller dt. So if Petsc did hit
> this error very rarely, we might be able to recovery gracefully.
>
> It does not appear to be seg faulting. So it seemed that the program was
> being terminated intentionally from within Petsc, which was puzzling, and
> why I was asking about that in my previous email.
>
> So - Chris made a great find. Turns out that right after PetscInitialize
> in our main.cpp, we had the line:
>
> PetscPushErrorHandler(PetscAbortErrorHandler, NULL);
>
> Which was telling Petsc to call MPI_Abort if there was an error. I
> probably put that line into the code years ago and forgot it was there. So,
> as Barry said, if we change the PetscErrorHandler option to ignore, then at
> least we can avoid the program aborting on the error, and hopefully be able
> to recover with our existing code logic.
>
> Also, may have found a clue on the root cause of the error. I had thought
> that were were checking all of our inputs to Petsc for issues such as out
> of range index values. But I went back and see that due to a versioning
> mistake, there is one particular error check on our inputs that was being
> removed from production builds by a preprocessor definition. Which means
> that it wouldn't be caught in our production builds, which means that it is
> possible that bad inputs could have been passed into Petsc. I don't know
> for sure - but is plausible. The missing error check was doing the
> following: checking to see if the fourth entry to MatSetValues ("n", for
> the number of nonzero values in the row) (
> https://www.mcs.anl.gov/petsc/petsc-current/docs/manualpages/Mat/MatSetValues.html)
> was equal to the sum of the number of diagonal and off diagonal values that
> we had specified in our previous call to MatMPIAIJSetPreallocation.
>
> So that is at least a theory for what was happening. The theory would be:
> very rarely, due to a bug in our code, we were running MatSetValues with
> "n" set to a value not equal to the number of nonzero values promised in
> the call to MatMPIAIJSetPreallocation. Maybe this led to the Petsc "key
> 7556 is greater than largest key allowed 5693" error message, and then our
> setting of 'PetscAbortErrorHandler' was causing the program to abort.
>
> Mark
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> On Sat, Sep 26, 2020 at 9:51 PM Barry Smith <bsmith at petsc.dev> wrote:
>
>>
>>
>> On Sep 26, 2020, at 5:58 PM, Junchao Zhang <junchao.zhang at gmail.com>
>> wrote:
>>
>>
>>
>> On Sat, Sep 26, 2020 at 5:44 PM Mark Adams <mfadams at lbl.gov> wrote:
>>
>>>
>>>
>>> On Sat, Sep 26, 2020 at 1:07 PM Matthew Knepley <knepley at gmail.com>
>>> wrote:
>>>
>>>> On Sat, Sep 26, 2020 at 11:17 AM Mark McClure <mark at resfrac.com> wrote:
>>>>
>>>>> Thank you, all for the explanations.
>>>>>
>>>>> Following Matt's suggestion, we'll use -g (and not use
>>>>> -with-debugging=0) all future compiles to all users, so in future, we can
>>>>> provide better information.
>>>>>
>>>>> Second, Chris is going to boil our function down to minimum stub and
>>>>> share in case there is some subtle issue with the way the functions are
>>>>> being called.
>>>>>
>>>>> Third, I have question/request - Petsc is, in fact, detecting an
>>>>> error. As far as I can tell, this is not an uncontrolled 'seg fault'. It
>>>>> seems to me that maybe Petsc could choose to return out from the function
>>>>> when it detects this error, returning an error code, rather than dumping
>>>>> the core and terminating the program. If Petsc simply returned out with an
>>>>> error message, this would resolve the problem for us. After the Petsc call,
>>>>> we check for Petsc error messages. If Petsc returns an error - that's fine
>>>>> - we use a direct solver as a backup, and the simulation continues. So - I
>>>>> am not sure whether this is feasible - but if Petsc could return out with
>>>>> an error message - rather than dumping the core and terminating the program
>>>>> - then that would effectively resolve the issue for us. Would this change
>>>>> be possible?
>>>>>
>>>>
>>>> At some level, I think it is currently doing what you want. CHKERRQ()
>>>> simply returns an error code from that function call, printing an error
>>>> message. Suppressing the message is harder I think,
>>>>
>>>
>>> He does not need this.
>>>
>>>
>>>> but for now, if you know what function call is causing the error, you
>>>> can just catch the (ierr != 0) yourself instead of using CHKERRQ.
>>>>
>>>
>>> This is what I suggested earlier but maybe I was not clear enough.
>>>
>>> Your code calls something like
>>>
>>> ierr = SNESSolve(....); CHKERRQ(ierr);
>>>
>>> You can replace this with:
>>>
>>>  ierr = SNESSolve(....);
>>>  if (ierr) {
>>>
>> How to deal with CHKERRQ(ierr); inside SNESSolve()?
>>
>>
>>
>>    PetscPushErrorHandler(PetscIgnoreErrorHandler,NULL);
>>
>>    But the problem in this code's runs appear to be due to corrupt data,
>> why and how it gets corrupted is not known. Continuing with an alternative
>> solver because a solver failed for numerical or algorithmic reasons is
>> generally fine but continuing when there is corrupted data is always iffy
>> because one doesn't know how far the corruption has spread.
>> SNESDestroy(&snes); SNESCreate(&snes); may likely clean out any potentially
>> corrupted data but if the corruption got into the mesh data structures it
>> will still be there.
>>
>>    A very sophisticated library code would, when it detects this type of
>> corruption, sweep through all the data structures looking for any
>> indications of corruption, to help determine the cause and/or even fix the
>> problem. We don't have this code in place, though we could add some,
>> because generally we relay on valgrind or -malloc_debug to detect such
>> corruption, the problem is valgrind and -malloc_debug don't fit well in a
>> production environment. Handling corruption that comes up in production but
>> not testing is difficult.
>>
>>  Barry
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>     ....
>>>  }
>>>
>>> I suggested something earlier to do here. Maybe call KSPView. You could
>>> even destroy the solver and start the solver from scratch and see if that
>>> works.
>>>
>>> Mark
>>>
>>>
>>>> The drawback here is that we might not have cleaned up
>>>> all the state so that restarting makes sense. It should be possible to
>>>> just kill the solve, reset the solver, and retry, although it is not clear
>>>> to me at first glance if MPI will be in an okay state.
>>>>
>>>>
>>
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