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Assigning Hosts Using LSF


   MPI Documentation  
HP Superdome Cluster


The load-sharing facility (LSF) allocates one or more hosts to run an MPI job. In general, LSF improves resource utilization for MPI jobs that run in multihost environments. LSF handles the job scheduling and the allocation of the necessary hosts and HP MPI handles the task of starting up the application's processes on the hosts selected by LSF.

By default mpirun starts the MPI processes on the hosts specified by the user, in effect handling the direct mapping of host names to IP addresses. This is a problem because when jobs are submitted to LSF, the user generally does not select the hosts his job will run on - LSF selects them based on the cluster load when the job is run, which may be quite different from the situation when the job was submitted. To work around this problem a script called runpam has been provided; if you want to examine it, the full pathname of the file is /opt/cluster/bin/runpam. It gets information on which hosts to use from LSF, then creates an internal appfile by which it uses with mpirun to run the program. More information is available about this process under the MPI section in the FAQ , and in the MPI Documentation section of this webpage.

If you want to run a mpi job which has sub-processes using a parallelized library routine, or a routine parallelized using OpenMP or other loop parallelization techniques, follow this link.
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Last modified:
November 17 2003 13:39:35.