hi, first of all, thanks for the info bill! i think i'm really starting to piece things together now. you are right in that i'm working with a 6.x (6.2 with 6.1 devel libs ;) install here at cadence, without the HPC extensions AFAIK. also, i think that are customers are mostly in the same position -- i assume that the HPC extensions cost extra? or perhaps admins just don't bother to install them.
so, there are at least three cases to consider: LSF 7.0 or greater LSF 6.x /w HPC LSF 6.x 'base' i'll try to gather more data, but my feeling it that the market penetration of both HPC and LSF 7.0 is low in our marker (EDA vendors and customers). i'd love to just stall until 7.0 is widely available, but perhaps in the mean time it would be nice to have some backward support for LSF 6.0 'base'. it seems like supporting LSF 6.x /w HPC might not be too useful, since: a) it's not clear that the 'built in' "bsub -n N -a openmpi foo" support will work with an MPI-2 dynamic-spawning application like mine (or does it?), b) i've heard that manually interfacing with the parallel application manager directly is tricky? c) most importantly, it's not clear than any of our customers have the HPC support, and certainly not all of them, so i need to support LSF 6.0 'base' anyway -- it only needs to work until 7.0 is widely available (< 1 year? i really have no idea ... will Platform end support for 6.x at some particular time? or otherwise push customers to upgrade? perhaps cadence can help there too ...) . under LSF 7.0 it looks like things are okay and that open-mpi will support it in a released version 'soon' (< 6 months? ). sooner than our customer wil have LSF 7.0 anyway, so that's fine. as for LSF 6.0 'base', there are two workarounds that i see, and a couple key questions that remain: 1) use bsub -n N, followed by N-1 ls_rtaske() calls (or similar). while ls_rtaske() may not 'force' me to follow the queuing rules, if i only launch on the proper machines, i should be okay, right? i don't think IO and process marshaling (i'm not sure exactly what you mean by that) are a problem since openmpi/orted handles those issues, i think? 2) use only bsub's of single processes, using some initial wrapper script that bsub's all the jobs (master + N-1 slaves) needed to reach the desired static allocation for openmpi. this seems to be what my internal guy is suggesting is 'required'. integration with openmpi might not be too hard, using suitable trickery. for example, the wrapper script launches some wrapper processes that are basically rexec daemons. the master waits for them to come up in the ras/lsf component (tcp notify, perhaps via the launcher machine to avoid needing to know the master hostname a priori), and then the pls/lsf component uses the thin rexec daemons to launch orted. seems like a bit of a silly workaround, but it does seem to both keep the queuing system happy as well as not need ls_rtaske() or similar. [ Note: (1) will fail if admins disable the ls_rexec() type of functionality, but on a LSF 6.0 'base' system, this would seem to disable all || job launching -- i.e. the shipped mpijob/pvmjob all use lsgrun and such, so they would be disabled -- is there any other way i could start the sub-processes within my allocation in that case? can i just have bsub start N copies of something (maybe orted?)? that seems like it might be hard to integrate with openmpi, though -- in that case, i'd probably just only impliment option (2)] Matt. On 7/17/07, Bill McMillan <bmcmil...@platform.com> wrote:
> there appear to be some overlaps between the ls_* and lsb_* functions, > but they seem basically compatible as far as i can tell. almost all > the functions have a command line version as well, for example: > lsb_submit()/bsub Like openmpi and orte, there are two layers in LSF. The ls_* API's talk to what is/was historically called "LSF Base" and the lsb_* API's talk to what is/was historically called "LSF Batch".
[SNIP]
Regards, Bill ------------- Bill McMillan Principal Technical Product Manager Platform Computing
