I'm not entirely convinced this actually achieves your goals, but I
can see some potential benefits. I'm also not sure that power
consumption is that big of an issue that MPI needs to begin chasing
"power saver" modes of operation, but that can be a separate debate
some day.
I'm assuming you don't mean that you actually call "sleep()" as this
would be very bad - I'm assuming you just change the opal_progress
"tick" rate instead. True? If not, and you really call "sleep", then I
would have to oppose adding this to the code base pending discussion
with others who can corroborate that this won't cause problems.
Either way, I could live with this so long as it was done as a
"configure-in" capability. Just having the params default to a value
that causes the system to behave similarly to today isn't enough - we
still wind up adding logic into a very critical timing loop for no
reason. A simple configure option of --enable-mpi-progress-monitoring
would be sufficient to protect the code.
HTH
Ralph
On Jun 8, 2009, at 9:50 AM, Sylvain Jeaugey wrote:
What : when nothing has been received for a very long time - e.g. 5
minutes, stop busy polling in opal_progress and switch to a usleep-
based one.
Why : when we have long waits, and especially when an application is
deadlock'ed, detecting it is not easy and a lot of power is wasted
until the end of the time slice (if there is one).
Where : an example of how it could be implemented is available at
http://bitbucket.org/jeaugeys/low-pressure-opal-progress/
Principle
=========
opal_progress() ensures the progression of MPI communication. The
current algorithm is a loop calling progress on all registered
components. If the program is blocked, the loop will busy-poll
indefinetely.
Going to sleep after a certain amount of time with nothing received
is interesting for two things :
- Administrator can easily detect whether a job is deadlocked : all
the processes are in sleep(). Currently, all processors are using
100% cpu and it is very hard to know if progression is still
happening or not.
- When there is nothing to receive, power usage is highly reduced.
However, it could hurt performance in some cases, typically if we go
to sleep just before the message arrives. This will highly depend on
the parameters you give to the sleep mechanism.
At first, we can start with the following assumption : if the sleep
takes T usec, then sleeping after 10000xT should slow down Receives
by a factor less than 0.01 %.
However, other processes may suffer from you being late, and be
delayed by T usec (which may represent more than 0.01% for them).
So, the goal of this mechanism is mainly to detect far-too-long-
waits and should quite never be used in normal MPI jobs. It could
also trigger a warning message when starting to sleep, or at least a
trace in the notifier.
Details of Implementation
=========================
Three parameters fully control the behaviour of this mechanism :
* opal_progress_sleep_count : number of unsuccessful opal_progress()
calls before we start the timer (to prevent latency impact). It
defaults to -1, which completely deactivates the sleep (and is
therefore equivalent to the former code). A value of 1000 can be
thought of as a starting point to enable this mechanism.
* opal_progress_sleep_trigger : time to wait before going to low-
pressure-powersave mode. Default : 600 (in seconds) = 10 minutes.
* opal_progress_sleep_duration : time we sleep at each further
unsuccessful call to opal_progress(). Default : 1000 (in us) = 1 ms.
The duration is big enough to make the process show 0% CPU in top,
but low enough to preserve a good trigger/duration ratio.
The trigger is voluntary high to keep a good trigger/duration ratio.
Indeed, to prevent delays from causing chain reactions, trigger
should be higher than duration * numprocs.
Possible Improvements & Pitfalls
================================
* Trigger could be set automatically at max(trigger, duration *
numprocs * 2).
* poll_start and poll_count could be fields of the opal_condition_t
struct.
* The sleep section may be exported in a #define and reported in all
the progress pathes (I'm not sure my patch is good for progress
threads for example)
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