Re: Not getting good speed up

From: Gengbin Zheng (gzheng_at_ks.uiuc.edu)
Date: Thu Mar 03 2005 - 13:34:56 CST

For UDP namd, use command line option: "+giga" which turned on some
setting (such as UDP window protocol settings) which could speedup the
performance. You can give it a try.

I noticed that the OS of your new cluster is Rock. I am not familar with
it, but I assume it has something different in the way it launch a
parallel job.

The error I have when building charm:

make: *** No rule to make target `charmm++'. Stop.
-------------------------------------------------
Charm++ NOT BUILT. Either cd into mpi-linux-icc/tmp and try

this is because you misspelled charm++ to charmm++.

Gengbin

Mauricio Carrillo Tripp wrote:

>Hi Gengbin, thanks for your answer. I did the comparison you recommend,
>TCP vs UDP (I didn't compile from source though, I used the
>executables NAMD supplies). The results are on Fig 2 at
>http://chem.acad.wabash.edu/~trippm/Clusters/performance.php.
>Indeed, I get an increase in performance but not good enough.
>Using the TCP version on the old cluster (lg66) did show good scaling,
>but that's not the case for the new cluster (lgrocks).
>Any ideas why is this, anybody?
>
>I'm trying to compile different versions of charm++ (gcc, intel, tcp,
>udp, mpi), to compare them using converse/pingpong,
>although I'm having trouble building the mpi version,
>I haven't found an example on how to do it, and all I get is:
>
>
>
>>./build charmm++ mpi-linux icc --libdir="/opt/lam/intel/lib"
>>
>>
>--incdir="/opt/lam/intel/include"
>Selected Compiler: icc
>Selected Options:
>Copying src/scripts/Makefile to mpi-linux-icc/tmp
>Soft-linking over bin
>Soft-linking over lib
>Soft-linking over lib_so
>Soft-linking over include
>Soft-linking over tmp
>Generating mpi-linux-icc/tmp/conv-mach-pre.sh
>Performing 'make charmm++ OPTS=' in mpi-linux-icc/tmp
>make: *** No rule to make target `charmm++'. Stop.
>-------------------------------------------------
>Charm++ NOT BUILT. Either cd into mpi-linux-icc/tmp and try
>
>any help will be appreciated!
>
>Thanks again.
>
>
>On Wed, 02 Mar 2005 21:42:39 -0600, Gengbin Zheng <gzheng_at_ks.uiuc.edu> wrote:
>
>
>>Hi Mauricio,
>>
>>With NAMD-tcp version, Charm deoes not compiled on top of MPI, the
>>communication is based on native TCP socket, that is Charm++ itself
>>implements its message passing function using TCP sockets.
>>I can not provide a reason to explain why the scaling is so bad, because
>>I don't think it should behave like that.
>>You can do some test running Charm pingpong tests (available at
>>charm/pgms/converse/pingpong), and see what's the pingpong one way
>>latency is to compare with MPI.
>>
>>In fact, I recommend you compile a UDP socket version of charm and NAMD
>>from source as comparison. (it is net-linux version of charm, and
>>Linux-i686 version of NAMD).
>>We have seen NAMD running with good scaling with gigabit ethernet.
>>
>>Gengbin
>>
>>Mauricio Carrillo Tripp wrote:
>>
>>
>>
>>>Hi,
>>>
>>>Some time ago I started using NAMD on a 16 node cluster
>>>with good results. I downloaded the executables (tcp version,
>>>the recomended one for gigabit network) and everything
>>>ran smoothly. The speed up was good (see Fig 1 at
>>>http://chem.acad.wabash.edu/~trippm/Clusters/performance.php),
>>>although maybe it could be improved, which takes me two the real
>>>issue: we got a new cluster, I did the same as before, but
>>>I noticed that the simulations were running a lot slower.
>>>I did the same analysis as I did with the old cluster
>>>and I found that the speed up was just terrible. I tried the other
>>>executable version of NAMD2.5 and things went a little better
>>>but not quite as good as I know the could've been (see Fig 2 at
>>>http://chem.acad.wabash.edu/~trippm/Clusters/performance.php).
>>>I also found a big difference between MPICH and LAM/MPI. The
>>>latter is the only MPI library installed in the old cluster.
>>>So, these results clearly show that the problem lays in the communication
>>>(cpu speed up is good)
>>>and they suggest that charm++ is behaving as MPICH (or worst),
>>>but I don't know the details of how charm++ works, i.e., does it
>>>rely on the MPI libraries? if so, how can I tell it which one to use?
>>>If not, how can I optimize its performance? (Is there a way to measure
>>>it in a similar way as NetPIPE does?). I would like to take the maximum
>>>advantage when running on 32 processors...
>>>
>>>Any advice will be appreciated. Thanks.
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>
>
>
>

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