[mvapich-discuss] Plans for MPMD support for mpirun_rsh

[Gus Correa]

Hi Jonathan, Craig, list

I second Craig's question and request for MPMD support.
That would be really great for Earth Science applications,
maybe for other areas as well.

For instance, the whole atmosphere/ocean/climate community
relies mostly on MPMD for most modern coupled climate models.
Typically you have five or more executables working in MPMD mode:
atmosphere, ocean, ice, land, etc, coordinated by a flux coupler.
Here is one example:
http://www.ccsm.ucar.edu/models/ccsm3.0/
Other computational frameworks in Earth Science follow the same
paradigm and require MPMD.

MPMD is particularly convenient in Linux clusters,
because it can keep reasonably small sized executables,
stacks, heaps, etc, whereas a SPMD executable containing
all code for multiple component models tends to be much larger,
and may even lead to memory paging, which is disastrous for MPI.

We are currently restricted to use OpenMPI and MPICH2 for
these MPMD models, which are at the forefront of our research efforts.
It is a pity that so far we cannot use MVAPICH2 to test and
run these MPMD programs, although we use MVAPICH2
for smaller and less challenging SPMD programs with excellent results.

Since MPICH2 supports MPMD, through the "mpiexec -configfile" option,
I wonder how difficult it would be to port
this capability to MVAPICH2 also.

Thank you very much,
Gus Correa
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Gustavo Correa
Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory - Columbia University
Palisades, NY, 10964-8000 - USA
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Jonathan Perkins wrote:
> On Mon, Dec 07, 2009 at 03:52:18PM -0700, Craig Tierney wrote:
>> >From what I can tell in the documentation, mpirun_rsh
>> is the favored launch mechanism.  However, I don't see
>> a way to launch MPMD applications.   If I read
>> the docs correctly (that it isn't supported), Are there
>> plans to add this to mpirun_rsh?
> 
> Yes, we plan to add this in a future mvapich2 release.
> 
>> Craig
>>
>> -- 
>> Craig Tierney (craig.tierney at noaa.gov)
>> _______________________________________________
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>> mvapich-discuss at cse.ohio-state.edu
>> http://mail.cse.ohio-state.edu/mailman/listinfo/mvapich-discuss
> 
> 
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