On 05/28/2014 09:29 AM, Erik Schnetter wrote:
Steve
Simfactory can do both. Disabling certain thorns is used for
exceptions, e.g. if a machine is currently broken and can currently
not build a particular thorn. If this thorn is "unimportant" (e.g.
pciutils), then most likely no one will notice. Of course, disabling
BSSN in this way would not be a good idea.
Does Simfactory enable commented out thorns, or does it add them?
Cheers,
Steve
-erik
On Wed, May 28, 2014 at 6:24 AM, Steven R. Brandt <[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
I think that processing things inside comments is confusing (if
that's what's happening), unless there's some special tag in the
comment, e.g. @@. Wouldn't it make more sense for SimFactory to
accept the list of uncommented thorns, and disable if appropriate?
Cheers,
Steve
On 05/27/2014 12:01 PM, Ian Hinder wrote:
On 27 May 2014, at 17:23, Erik Schnetter <[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
On Tue, May 27, 2014 at 10:51 AM, Frank Loeffler
<[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
On Tue, May 27, 2014 at 09:46:29AM -0500, Frank Loeffler wrote:
> Wouldn't that mean that every checkout on such a machine
fails, because
> simfactory would unconditionally add these thorns to the
thornlist,
> regardless of whether they are actually present or not?
Replying to myself: Is this really what Simfactory does - or
does it
only "enable" these thorns when they are present in the
thornlist, but
commented out? If the latter is the case I think it should
be fine,
although it might still confuse people that don't even look
at the
simfactory configuration of the machine, and use a thornlist
with such a
thorn commented out, but not present. Could we somehow let
these users
give a hint why Cactus fails with 'thorn not found', when
the original
thornlist clearly commented it out?
As per our previous discussion, the standard ET thorn list will
(and this is the current state)
1. Check out all CUDA and OpenCL thorns, on ALL machines
2. Disable all CUDA and OpenCL thorns when building Cactus, on
ALL machines
If you are using this standard thorn list directly, then this is
the only reasonable way to go; other choices don't make sense.
Simfactory pre-processes thorn lists, in the same way it
pre-processes option lists and parameter files, expanding
variables. It is important to have such a pre-processing step,
since it avoids having to do this manually. This is how
Simfactory "fixes" things for various machines, it is an
important part of how it works.
Blue Waters supports both CUDA and OpenCL. We now have two options:
1. Use the standard ET thorn list there, i.e. disabling CUDA and
OpenCL by default
2. Automatically enable CUDA and OpenCL thorns
As others mentioned, it does not make sense to enable CUDA and
OpenCL everywhere, since it would not be supported everywhere.
Enabling the thorns but adding a mechanism that turns these
thorns into dummy thorns that do nothing also doesn't make sense
-- think of a BSSN thorn written in CUDA; turning it into a
dummy thorn that does nothing on a non-CUDA machine would just
mean that BSSN evolution doesn't happen there. There are
machines that support CUDA and there are machines that don't,
and if you want to use CUDA then you will need to get an error
message when you try to use a machine that doesn't support CUDA.
So -- how do we want to support CUDA on Blue Waters?
1. Ask people to manually change the thorn list, in effect
asking them to maintain one thorn list per machine
2. Let Simfactory do this, since it already knows what works on
what machine and what doesn't
I don't think there are any other choices.
In case you are wondering: What I propose won't break checking
out thorns on any machine, and won't break the build on any
machine, and won't require people to do special things for
special machines. I regularly build on many machines, and I do
so in an automated manner, and I don't maintain per-machine
thorn lists or parameter files. Simfactory has an MDB that
encodes all the machines' peculiarities, and the information
there is sufficient to use all of our machines efficiently, and
in an automated manner.
There is the argument of "this would surprise people". If we are
worried about people being surprised that a CUDA thorn can't be
activated on a non-CUDA machine, then maybe we need to raise our
expectations a bit.
I have been "surprised" in the past when I saw a thorn commented
out in the thornlist, and Cactus trying to build it because
SimFactory has enabled it on a particular machine. I had no idea
what was going on, and couldn't believe that simfactory was doing
this when I found that it was. I think if something is commented
out, it should be ignored.
Maybe we could add a feature to the Cactus thornlist language for
"included if available"? e.g.
? Arrangement/Thorn
SimFactory could expand this, and Cactus would ignore it by
default. This is similar to the existing "!" comments which are
used by GetComponents, and ignored by Cactus. At least this way,
it doesn't look like it has been commented out.
--
Ian Hinder
http://numrel.aei.mpg.de/people/hinder
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--
Erik Schnetter <[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>>
http://www.perimeterinstitute.ca/personal/eschnetter/
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