On Jan 24, 2007, at 7:03 AM, Pak Lui wrote:

Geoff Galitz wrote:
Hello,
On the following system:
OpenMPI 1.1.1
SGE 6.0 (with tight integration)
Scientific Linux 4.3
Dual Dual-Core Opterons
MPI jobs are oversubscribing to the nodes. No matter where jobs are launched by the scheduler, they always stack up on the first node (node00) and continue to stack even though the system load exceeds 6 (on a 4 processor box). Eeach node is defined as 4 slots with 4 max slots. The MPI jobs launch via "mpirun -np (some-number-of- processors)" from within the scheduler.

Hi Geoff,

I think we first start having SGE support in 1.2, not in 1.1.1. Unless you did some modification on your own to include the gridengine ras/pls modules from v1.2, you probably are not using the SGE tight integration. So even though you start mpirun in the SGE parallel environment, ORTE does not have the gridengine modules for allocating and launching the jobs, so that could be why all processes are launched on the same node. (because there's no node list available from gridengine and it defaults to single node)


I have used the backport instructions provided by Olli-Pekka Lehto. Of course, if it is running properly in my case, I can't say as I am certainly not getting the expected behavior, although the jobs do run.

On a related note, there is a way for SGE to allocate and assign slots for launching tasks. It is done by setting the allocation rule in the parallel environment (PE). If all of the slots are allocated on the same node, it sounds like the allocation rule has been set to $fill_up. Maybe you can try with $round_robin instead?



If I use $round_robin, one MPI process starts up per node and then wraps around the cluster. So if I have 4 process MPI job, it starts 1 process on 4 nodes which is certainly not the most efficient method.

It seems to me that MPI is not detecting that the nodes are overloaded and that due to the way the job slots are defined and how mpirun is being called. If I read the documentation correctly, a single mpirun run consumes one job slot no matter the number of processes which are launched. We can chagne the number of job slots, but then we expect to waste processors since only one mpirun job will run on any node, even if the job is only a two processor job.

As for oversubscription, I remember we start having that - nooversubscribe option in v1.2 so if you want to limit ORTE from oversubscribing because by default oversubscription is allowed.


So it seems the real story for me is that there is no logic that detects the oversubscription condition and re-schedules the job for another node in the MPI nodelist in OpenMPI 1.1.1? If so, that would certainly explain what I am seeing. Is that correct?

-geoff

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