Florian,
There's two ways. You can make your whole app MPI-based, but only have
the master process do any of the sequential work, while the others spin
until the parallel part. That's the easiest, but you then have MPI
everywhere in your app. The other way is to have the MPI processes
exist totally outside your main sequential process. This keeps you
isolated from the MPI, but it's a lot more work.
I've done the MPI on the outside with the MUMPS linear solver. You need
to spin up the MPI process group separately, so your sequential process
isn't doing any work while they're running. You also need to send data
to the MPI processes, which I used Boost's Shared-Memory library for (if
you can't use C++ in your project this won't work for you at all). You
also have to keep the MPI processes and the main process synchronised
and you need your main process to surrender it's core while the MPI
solve is going on, so you end up with a bunch of Sleep or sched_yield
calls so that everything plays nicely. The whole thing takes a *lot* of
tweaking to get right. Honestly, it's a total pig and I'd recommend
against this path (we don't use it anymore in our software).
If you just need a good parallel, direct linear solver (I'm making an
assumption here) to run in one memory space, go grab SuperLU-MT from here:
http://crd-legacy.lbl.gov/~xiaoye/SuperLU/#superlu_mt
or use the LiS solver package from here if you want an iterative solver:
http://www.ssisc.org/lis/
Both of these can handle very large problems in shared-memory and have
good scale-up.
Damien
On 18/11/2013 7:09 AM, Florian Bruckner wrote:
hi,
how can i call an MPI parallelized solver routine from a sequential
code. The sequential code is already existing and the structure looks
like to following:
void main()
{
do {
x = rand();
sequential_code(); // this sequential code should only be
executed on the master node
if (x == 2345) MPIsolve(); // this should be run in parallel
} while(x == 1234);
}
i'm wondering how the call MPI-parallelized solver routine can be
called without parallelizing the whole existing sequential code. at a
certain point of the code-path of the sequential code, the parallel
execution should be started, but how can this be achived.
when starting the application with mpirun there must be some code
running on each node. and the same code-path needs to be followed by
each process. But this would mean that exactly the same sequential
code needs to be executed on each node!?
what am i missing?
thanks in advance
Florian
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