[Mpi3-ft] Communicator Virtualization as a step forward

Thu Feb 12 13:16:23 CST 2009

I really worry about taking the advise of users saying they would rather 
terminate and restart an application than having some assistance to help 
them ride through a problem.  If they are worried about programming 
language/model changes, I would encourage them to open their eyes.  
Major programming model changes are predicted for > petascale computers 
and even petascale computers are having a hard time with classical MPI 
programming.  I think we're more likely to see MPI as an underpinning of 
next-gen models.  These users polled might not be extreme-scale users, 
however. 

Working at a laboratory positioning itself for exascale, we are 
intimately aware of the fact that "oh just rerun it" is a worthless 
conclusion.  I wish I had more time to assist in this matter but our 
laboratory has cracked down on participation in things that are not 
directly associated with charge codes so it's a bit hard for me to spend 
any sizable amount of time.

Please though, consider the user base when they say things like that.  
I'm sure Rich is well aware of these similar concerns.  While MPI fault 
tolerance might not be important to the users running 1000 node systems, 
those of us approaching system mean time to interrupt under an hour are 
quite on the opposite side of that spectrum.

Are the small-system users pushing for FT to not be inside of MPI?  This 
is why I was so in favor of some sort of componentized MPI where users 
could exclude FT if they weren't worried about reliability (and thereby 
gain performance) but those of us who were in more dangerous reliability 
regimes could take the performance penalty and compile in / load in / 
configure in / whatever FT.

-- Nathan

---------------------------------------------------------------------
Nathan DeBardeleben, Ph.D.
Los Alamos National Laboratory
High Performance Computing Systems Integration (HPC-5)
phone: 505-667-3428
email: ndebard at lanl.gov
--------------------------------------------------------------------- 

Graham, Richard L. wrote:
> Josh,
>   Very early on in the process we got feedback from users that an ft-mpi like interface was of no interest to them.  They would just as soon terminate the application and restart rather than use this sort of approach.  Having said that, there is already previous demonstration that the ft-mpi approach is useful for some applications.  If you look closely at the spec, the ft-mpi approach is a subset. of the current subset.
>   I am working on pulling out the api's and expanding the explanations.  The goal is to have this out before the next telecon in two weeks.
>   Prototyping is under way, with ut, cray, and ornl committed to working on this.  Right now supporting infrastructure is being developed.
>   Your point on the mpi 2 interfaces is good.  A couple of people had started to look at this when it looked like this might make it into the 2.2 version.  The changes seemed to be more extensive than expected, so work stopped.  This does need to be picked up on.
>
> Rich
> ------Original Message------
> From: Josh Hursey
> To: MPI 3.0 Fault Tolerance and Dynamic Process Control working Group
> ReplyTo: MPI 3.0 Fault Tolerance and Dynamic Process Control working Group
> Sent: Feb 12, 2009 8:31 AM
> Subject: Re: [Mpi3-ft] Communicator Virtualization as a step forward
>
> It is a good point that local communicator reconstruction operations  
> require a fundamental change in the way communicators are handled by  
> MPI. With that in mind it would probably take as much effort (if not  
> more) to implement a virtualized version on top of MPI. So maybe it  
> will not help as much as I had originally thought. Outside of the  
> paper, do we have the interface and semantics of these operations  
> described anywhere? I think that would help in trying to keep pace  
> with the use cases.
>
> The spirit of the suggestion was as a way to separate what (I think)  
> we can agree on as a first step (FT-MPI-like model) from the  
> communicator reconstruction, which I see as a secondary step. If we  
> stop to write up what the FT-MPI-like model should look like in the  
> standard, then I think we can push forward on other fronts  
> (prototyping of step 1, standardization of step 1, application  
> implementations using step 1) while still trying to figure out how  
> communication reconstruction should be expressed in the standard such  
> that it is usable in target applications.
>
> So my motion is that the group explicitly focus effort on writing a  
> document describing the FT-MPI-like model we consider as a  
> foundation. Do so in the MPI standard language, and present it to the  
> MPI Forum for a straw vote in the next couple of meetings. From this  
> document we can continue evolving it to support more advanced  
> features, like communicator reconstruction.
>
> I am willing to put effort into making such a document. However, I  
> would like explicit support from the working group in pursing such an  
> effort, and the help of anyone interested in helping write-up/define  
> this specification.
>
> So what do people think taking this first step?
>
> -- Josh
>
>
> On Feb 11, 2009, at 5:57 PM, Greg Bronevetsky wrote:
>
>   
>> I don't understand what you mean by "We can continue to pursue  
>> communicator reconstruction interfaces though a virtualization  
>> later above MPI."  To me it seems that such interfaces will  
>> effectively need to implement communicators on top of MPI in order  
>> be operational, which will take about as much effort as  
>> implementing them inside MPI. In particular, I don't see a way to  
>> recreate a communicator using the MPI interface without making  
>> collective calls. However, we're defining MPI_Rejoin (or whatever  
>> its called) to be a local operation. This means that we cannot use  
>> the MPI communicators interface and must instead implement our own  
>> communicators.
>>
>> The bottom line is that it does make sense to start implementing  
>> support for the FT-MPI model and evolve that to a more elaborate  
>> model. However, I don't think that working on the rest above MPI  
>> will save us any effort or time.
>>
>> Greg Bronevetsky
>> Post-Doctoral Researcher
>> 1028 Building 451
>> Lawrence Livermore National Lab
>> (925) 424-5756
>> bronevetsky1 at llnl.gov
>>
>> At 01:17 PM 2/11/2009, Josh Hursey wrote:
>>     
>>> In our meeting yesterday, I was sitting in the back trying to take in
>>> the complexity of communicator recreation. It seems that much of the
>>> confusion at the moment is that we (at least I) are still not exactly
>>> sure how the interface should be defined and implemented.
>>>
>>> I think of the process fault tolerance specification as a series of
>>> steps that can be individually specified building upon each step  
>>> while
>>> working towards a specific goal set. From this I was asking  
>>> myself, is
>>> there any foundational concepts that we can define now so that folks
>>> can start implementation.
>>>
>>> That being said I suggest that we consider FT-MPI's model of all
>>> communicators except the base 3 (COMM_WORLD, COMM_SELF, COMM_NULL)  
>>> are
>>> destroyed on a failure as the starting point for implementation. This
>>> would get us started. We can continue to pursue communicator
>>> reconstruction interfaces though a virtualization later above MPI. We
>>> can use this layer to experiment with the communicator recreation
>>> mechanisms in conjunction with applications while pursing the first
>>> step implementation. Once we start to agree on the interface for
>>> communicator reconstruction, then we can start to push it into the  
>>> MPI
>>> standard/library for a better standard/implementation.
>>>
>>> The communicator virtualization library is a staging area for these
>>> interface ideas that we seem to be struggling with. The  
>>> virtualization
>>>       
>
> ------Original Message Truncated------
>
> _______________________________________________
> mpi3-ft mailing list
> mpi3-ft at lists.mpi-forum.org
> http://lists.mpi-forum.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/mpi3-ft
>   