IBM Platform MPI 9.1.2 Fix Pack 1 Readme File

Description

Readme documentation for IBM ® Platform™ MPI 9.1.2 Fix Pack 1 including installation-related instructions, prerequisites, and list of fixes.

Readme file for: IBM® Platform™ MPI

Product/Component Release: 9.1.2

Update Name: Fix pack 1

Fix ID: Platform_MPI_09.01.02.01

Publication date: 20 February 2014

Last modified date: 20 February 2014

Contents:

1. Product website. 1
2. Products or components affected. 1
3. System requirements. 1
4. Installation and configuration. 2
5. List of changes. 3
6. Copyright and trademark information. 4

1. Product website

View the IBM ® Platform™ MPI 9.1.2 Fix Pack 1 website at the following location: http://www.ibm.com/systems/technicalcomputing/platformcomputing/products/mpi/index.html.

2. Products or components affected

IBM® Platform™ MPI

3. System requirements

3.1 IBM® Platform™ MPI for Linux

• Intel/AMD x86-32-bit, AMD Opteron, and EMT64 servers
• CentOS 5, Red Hat Enterprise Linux AS 4, 5, and 6, and SuSE Linux Enterprise Server 9, 10, and 11 operating systems.
• A minimum of 49 MB of disk space in the installation directory (/opt), and a minimum of 120 MB of disk space in /tmp during installation.

3.2 IBM® Platform™ MPI for Windows

• Intel/AMD x86-32-bit, AMD Opteron, and EMT64 servers
• Operating system:
• 64-bit Windows HPC Server 2008 or
• 32- or 64-bit Windows 7, Server 2003, Server 2008, Vista, XP.
• A minimum of 50 MB of disk space in the installation directory (C:\Program Files (x86)), and a minimum of 120 MB of temporary space in the local disk during installation.
• On any non-HPCS system that does not have LSF installed, all systems which will be used to run or submit IBM® Platform™ MPI jobs must be members of the same active directory domain. You must install and start the IBM® Platform™ MPI Remote Launch service to run on all Windows 2008 systems except Windows HPC Server 2008 and Windows LSF. The service is not required to run in SMP (single system) mode.

4. Installation and configuration

4.1 Before installation

None.

4.2 Installation steps

IBM® Platform™ MPI for Linux:

IBM® Platform™ MPI must be installed on all machines in the same directory or be accessible through the same shared network path. The following describes the process of using the shell archive-based installer to install the product using the RPM database

1. Place the downloaded file into the /tmp directory.
2. Run the installer with superuser privileges.

For example,

sudo ./platform_mpi-09.01.02.01r.x64.bin

Verifying archive integrity... All good.

Uncompressing platform_mpi-09.01.02.01r.x64.bin......

<End User License Agreement>

Press Enter to continue viewing the license agreement, or

enter "1" to accept the agreement, "2" to decline it, "3"

to print it, "4" to read non-IBM terms, or "99" to go back

to the previous screen.

3. Review the license agreement, then select option 1 to accept the agreement and continue the installation.

The license agreement is available in the $MPI_ROOT/EULA directory after completing the installation.

For additional installer command options, refer to the Installation information section of the Release Notes for IBM ® Platform™ MPI: Linux (Version 9.1).

IBM® Platform™ MPI for Windows:

To use the standard interactive installation, double-click PlatformMPI-09.1.2.1r.w64.exe and follow the onscreen prompts to install the product.

For other options, including invoking the installer from the command line to enable unattended installation from a command window, refer to the Installation instructions section of the Release Notes for IBM ® Platform™ MPI: Windows (Version 9.1).

4.3 After installation

None.

4.4 Uninstalling

None.

5. List of changes

• Microsoft HPC Servers require the 32bit Microsoft Visual C++ 2008 Redistributable Package (x86) to load libwlm-hpc.dll and libhpc.dll at runtime.  Please ensure all Windows HPC compute nodes and Windows HPC client nodes used to submit jobs to the HPC cluster have Microsoft Visual C++ 2008 Redistributable Package (x86) installed.
  
  You can download Microsoft Visual C++ 2008 Redistributable Package (x86) from: http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=29
  

• Resolved an issue with the "IsExclusive" bit for pcmpiccpservice.exe on Windows HPC Server 2008 R2. By default, the Platform MPI services on Windows HPC are launched with the "IsExclusive" bit set. This allows individual ranks to inherit the full CPU affinity mask assigned by the Windows HPC scheduler for all processes on that node. However, when the "IsExclusive" bit is set, other jobs cannot start successfully until the first job completes.
  
  

Windows HPC Server 2008 R2 includes an enhancement that avoids the need to set the "IsExclusive" bit, while still allowing the ranks to use the appropriate CPU affinity mask allocated for the job. This change happens automatically when Windows HPC Server 2008 R2 is detected as the job scheduler.

• Resolved an issue launching MPMD applications on Windows, where Windows applications that start more than one different executable on a single host (such as MPMD programs) will hang on job startup. There is no known workaround for this issue.

• Resolved an issue with MPI_TMPDIR paths that contain 64 or more characters. The error message associated with this issue was as follows:

Error in cpu affinity, during shared memory setup, step2.

The workaround for this issue was to set MPI_TMPDIR to a shorter path.

• Added an alias to reduce maximum possible pinned memory footprint.

The alias "-cmd=pinmemreduce" will set the following options:

-e MPI_PIN_PERCENTAGE=50

-e MPI_RDMA_MSGSIZE=16384,16384,1048576

-e MPI_RDMA_NFRAGMENT=64

The calculation for maximum possible pinned memory footprint is very conservative. On some 16 core/node machines, with job sizes larger than 512 ranks, the calculation can exceed the physical memory installed on a system. The typical error message begins with the following:

ERROR: The total amount of memory that may be pinned (# bytes), is insufficient to support even minimal rdma network transfers.

This alias reduces the maximum pinned fragment size, the maximum number of pinned fragments, and the maximum percentage of physical memory that can be pinned. For messages larger than 1MB, there may be a minor performance degradation with these settings.

• Fixed an issue using Platform MPI with LSF 9.x and later. LSF 9.1.1.0 includes some enhancements that required a change in the APIs for interacting with the job scheduler. By default, Platform MPI uses the pre-9.x APIs to better support the current installed base of LSF users.

LSF 9.1.1.0 and later is supported with Platform MPI 9.1.2.0 and later. To schedule a job to LSF using mpirun, add "-e MPI_USELSF_VERSION=9" to the mpirun command line. Not all Platform MPI and LSF options require this environment variable to be set, but it is safe to use in all cases.

Typical error messages associated with this issue were as follows:

mpirun: Failed to load wlm-lsf.so.

mpirun: Failed to load wlm-lsf.dll.

In rare cases, no error message is produced, and the mpirun command will SIGSEGV before any remote processes are started.

• Resolved an issue with non-existent hosts provided as input to a Platform MPI job. When a non-existent host name was provided as an input to a Platform MPI 9.1.2.0 job, the DNS look-up of that host could hang.
• Enabled dynamic service level for PCMPI_IB_DYNAMIC_SL=1 and XRC mode.
• Increased the maximum number of IPv4 addresses on a single host to 256.
• Resolved an issue with the product "Version" string in the instr file.

6. Copyright and trademark information

© Copyright IBM Corporation 2014

U.S. Government Users Restricted Rights - Use, duplication or disclosure restricted by GSA ADP Schedule Contract with IBM Corp.

IBM®, the IBM logo and ibm.com® are trademarks of International Business Machines Corp., registered in many jurisdictions worldwide. Other product and service names might be trademarks of IBM or other companies. A current list of IBM trademarks is available on the Web at "Copyright and trademark information" at www.ibm.com/legal/copytrade.shtml.