On Jun 23, 2009, at 11:04 , Eugene Loh wrote:
The sm BTL used to have two mechanisms for dealing with congested
FIFOs. One was to grow the FIFOs. Another was to queue pending
sends locally (on the sender's side). I think the grow-FIFO
mechanism was typically invoked and the pending-send mechanism used
only under extreme circumstances (no more memory).
With the sm makeover of 1.3.2, we dropped the ability to grow
FIFOs. The code added complexity and there seemed to be no need to
have two mechanisms to deal with congested FIFOs. In ticket 1944,
however, we see that repeated collectives can produce hangs, and
this seems to be due to the pending-send code not adequately dealing
with congested FIFOs.
Today, when a process tries to write to a remote FIFO and fails, it
queues the write as a pending send. The only condition under which
it retries pending sends is when it gets a fragment back from a
remote process.
I think the logic must have been that the FIFO got congested because
we issued too many sends. Getting a fragment back indicates that
the remote process has made progress digesting those sends. In
ticket 1944, we see that a FIFO can also get congested from too many
returning fragments. Further, with shared FIFOs, a FIFO could
become congested due to the activity of a third-party process.
In sum, getting a fragment back from a remote process is a poor
indicator that it's time to retry pending sends.
Maybe the real way to know when to retry pending sends is just to
check if there's room on the FIFO.
Why this is different than "getting a fragment back"? As far as I
remember the code, when we get a fragment back we add it back in the
LIFO, and therefore it become the next available fragment for a send.
george.
So, I'll try modifying MCA_BTL_SM_FIFO_WRITE. It'll start by
checking if there are pending sends. If so, it'll retry them before
performing the requested write. This should also help preserve
ordering a little better. I'm guessing this will not hurt our
message latency in any meaningful way, but I'll check this out.
Meanwhile, I wanted to check in with y'all for any guidance you
might have.
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