Thanks this is all interesting articles.

Brock Palen
Center for Advanced Computing
bro...@umich.edu
(734)936-1985


On Aug 17, 2007, at 3:13 PM, Jeff Squyres wrote:

On Aug 17, 2007, at 12:16 PM, Brock Palen wrote:

We have a user who uses the sepran1206 package.  It works for him on
lam, mpich2 and OMPI up to problem sizes i see in the debugger (ddt)
that both rank 0 and rank 1 call PMPI_SEND()
Is PMPI_SEND the same as MPI_SEND?

For the most part, yes.  In Open MPI on many operating systems, one
is a weak symbol for the other (so in a debugger, you might see your
app call PMPI_Send instead of MPI_Send).  On other operating systems
where weak symbols are not supported (e.g., OS X), there are two
copies of the same C function, one named MPI_Send and the other named
PMPI_Send (ditto for Fortran).

The "PMPI" versions are what are called the profiling versions --
meaning that someone can write their own 3rd party library and
provide "MPI_<foo>" functions to intercept all the MPI calls.  They
can then do process accounting, tracing, or whatever they want to do,
and then call the back-end "PMPI_<foo>" function to perform the
actual MPI functionality.  See the "profiling" chapter of the MPI-1
spec if you care about the details.

also why would it work with lam and mpich2 ?

If we up the btl_sm_eager_limit it works, (obviously due to the
blocking nature of both calling MPI_SEND)
but I am confused as to why lam works and ompi does not.

A common reason for this kind of behavior is assuming that MPI_SEND
will not block.  Check out an old magazine column that I wrote about
this topic:

     http://cw.squyres.com/columns/2004-08-CW-MPI-Mechanic.pdf

It's "#1" on my top-10 list of evils to avoid in parallel (that
column is part 2 of 2 -- part 1 is http://cw.squyres.com/columns/
2004-07-CW-MPI-Mechanic.pdf).    I also talk about the same problem
in this column under the "Debugging a Classic MPI Mistake" heading:

     http://cw.squyres.com/columns/2005-01-CW-MPI-Mechanic.pdf

I'll likely be copying/moving the PDFs of these old columns to
www.open-mpi.org in the not-distant future.

BTW: I'm not saying that this is definitely the problem, but from
your description, it certainly could be.

--
Jeff Squyres
Cisco Systems

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