Thanks for the valuable input. I'll change to a wait-and-watch approach. The FAQ on tuning sm says "If the session directory is located on a network filesystem, the shared memory BTL latency will be extremely high." And the title is 'Why am I seeing incredibly poor performance...'. So I made the leap that this configuration must be avoided at all costs...
-----Original Message----- From: users-boun...@open-mpi.org [mailto:users-boun...@open-mpi.org] On Behalf Of David Singleton Sent: Sunday, November 06, 2011 4:15 PM To: us...@open-mpi.org Subject: Re: [OMPI users] EXTERNAL: Re: How to set up state-less node /tmp for OpenMPI usage On 11/05/2011 09:11 AM, Blosch, Edwin L wrote: .. > > I know where you're coming from, and I probably didn't title the post > correctly because I wasn't sure what to ask. But I definitely saw it, and > still see it, as an OpenMPI issue. Having /tmp mounted over NFS on a > stateless cluster is not a broken configuration, broadly speaking. The > vendors made those decisions and presumably that's how they do it for other > customers as well. There are two other (Platform/HP) MPI applications that > apparently work normally. But OpenMPI doesn't work normally. So it's > deficient. > I'm also concerned that there is a bit of an over-reaction to network filesystems. Stores to mmap'd files do not instantly turn into filesystem writes - there are dirty_writeback parameters to control how often writes occur and its typically 5-20 seconds. Ideally, memory or a local disk is used for session directories but, in many cases, you just wont notice a performance hit from network filesystems - we didn't when we tested session directories on Lustre. If your app is one of those handful that is slowed by OS jitter at megascale, then you may well notice. Obviously, its something to test. For our 1.5 install, I removed Lustre from the list of filesystem types that generate the warning message about network filesystems. It would be nice if it was a site choice whether or not to produce that message and when. David _______________________________________________ users mailing list us...@open-mpi.org http://www.open-mpi.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/users
