[Mpi-forum] user-defined reductions and re-entrancy

[William Gropp]

The standard doesn’t explicitly address this.

However, in the spirit of the standard, I would say yes, multiple threads may be used.  The behavior of side effects of the function are not defined, nor is it required to apply to elements 0..n-1 in that order in an n-element vector (this is a vector on each process; the is/is-not commutative applies between processes).  Rather than try to enumerate and disallow certain actions, I think this is the right solution - the action of the user function on the input parameters is defined; nothing else should be.  An implementation might warn users that the function may be called by multiple threads concurrently (e.g., to use atomic memory operations to count invocations or increment “evil”).

Bill

William Gropp
Director, Parallel Computing Institute
Thomas M. Siebel Chair in Computer Science
Chief Scientist, NCSA
University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign





On Oct 20, 2015, at 1:04 PM, Jeff Hammond <jeff.science at gmail.com> wrote:

> Thanks Jed for clarifying. I agree with your modified example. 
> 
> The fundamental question here remains: can an implementation internally call user-defined reduction operators from multiple threads at the same time?
> 
> Jeff 
> 
> Sent from my iPhone
> 
>> On Oct 20, 2015, at 10:50 AM, Jed Brown <jedbrown at mcs.anl.gov> wrote:
>> 
>> "Balaji, Pavan" <balaji at anl.gov> writes:
>> 
>>> You can't call MPI functions in there, but you can replace the abort with an exit(1).
>> 
>> MPI-3.0 p184: "MPI_ABORT may be called inside the function in case of an error."
>> 
>>> Each user function is called once per process, so "evil" will always be 1, isn't it?  I'm not sure why reentrance is an issue here.
>> 
>> Jeff said "user code increments evil once between every call to this
>> function so that it should never fail in single-threaded execution".
>> 
>> A self-contained rendition:
>> 
>> void User_reduce(void* invec, void* inoutvec, int *len, MPI_Datatype *datatype)
>> {
>> static int evil = 0;
>> double * in = (double*)invec;
>> double * out = (double*)inoutvec;
>> if (*datatype == MPI_DOUBLE && (++evil%2) == 1) {
>>   for (int i=0; i<*len; i++) out[i] = evil*in[i];
>>   evil++;
>> } else {
>>   MPI_Abort(1,MPI_COMM_WORLD);
>> }
>> }
>> 
>> The results certainly depend on how an implementation segments a buffer
>> and on which process the reduction is called.  Additionally, calling the
>> reduction from multiple threads may cause a non-deterministic abort.
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