[mvapich-discuss] tcmalloc issues

[Jeff Hammond]

Hi,

The MADNESS team (copied) has encountered an issue with MVAPICH2 and
Google TCMalloc, which is not the first time this has happened (see
GraphLab: http://forum.graphlab.com/discussion/51/unable-to-compile-graphlab-analytics-with-mpi).
I don't have the details, but the nature of the issue seems pretty
obvious from the GraphLab explanation.

TCMalloc improves the performance of MADNESS in a nontrivial way,
hence it is a very bad user experience for us if MVAPICH2 does not
allow us to use it.  We can, of course, disable TCMalloc, but since
small and non-small object allocation from C++ on many threads is
something MADNESS does constantly, PTMalloc is going to be suboptimal,
since it is known to not handle this usage well.

What is the workaround for this and is there a long-term solution that
will allow MVAPICH2 to interoperate with memory allocators other than
ptmalloc?  It is particularly important to have MVAPICH2 interoperate
with JEMalloc in the future (see
https://github.com/memkind/memkind/blob/master/README for clues as to
why).

Thanks,

Jeff

-- 
Jeff Hammond
jeff.science at gmail.com
http://jeffhammond.github.io/