Running a parallel job

Overview

Teaching: 10 min
Exercises: 5 min

Questions

• How do we execute a task in parallel?

Objectives

• Understand how to run a parallel job on a cluster.

We now have the tools we need to run a multi-processor job. This is a very important aspect of HPC systems, as parallelism is one of the primary tools we have to improve the performance of computationnal tasks.

Running the Parallel Job

We will run an example that uses the Message Passing Interface (MPI) for parallelism – this is a common tool on HPC systems.

What is MPI?

The Message Passing Interface is a set of tools which allow multiple parallel jobs to communicate with each other. Typically, a single executable is run multiple times, possibly on different machines, and the MPI tools are used to inform each instance of the executable about how many instances there are, which instance it is. MPI also provides communication tools to allow communication and coordination between instances. An MPI instance typically has its own copy of all the local variables.

MPI jobs cannot generally be run as stand-alone executables. Instead, they should be started with the mpirun command, which ensures that the appropriate run-time support for parallelism is included.

On its own, mpirun can take many arguments specifying how many machines will partcipate in the process. In the context of our queuing system, however, we do not need to specify this information, the mpirun command will obtain it from the queuing system, by examining the environment variables set when the job is launched.

Our example implements a stochastic algorithm for estimating the value of pi, the ratio of the circumference to the diameter of a circle. The program generates a large number of random points on a 2x2 square centered on the origin, and checks how many of these points fall inside the unit circle. On average, pi/4 of the randomly-selected points should fall in the circle, so pi can be estimated from 4*f, where f is the observed fraction of points that fall in the circle. Because each sample is independent, this algorithm is easily implemented in parallel.

We have provided a Python implementation, which uses MPI and Numpy.

Download the Python executable using the following command:

[yourUsername@gra-login1 ~]$ wget https://ualberta-rcg.github.io/hpc-intro/files/pi.py

Feel free to examine the code in an editor – it is richly commented, and should provide some educational value.

Our purpose here is to exercise the parallel workflow of the cluster.

Create a submission file, requesting more than one task on a single node:

[yourUsername@gra-login1 ~]$ nano parallel-example.sh
[yourUsername@gra-login1 ~]$ cat parallel-example.sh

#!/bin/bash
#SBATCH -J parallel-example
#SBATCH -p testing
#SBATCH -N 1
#SBATCH -n 4

module load python3
mpirun ./pi.py

Then submit your job. We will use the batch file to set the options, rather than the command line.

[yourUsername@gra-login1 ~]$ sbatch parallel-example.sh

As before, use the status commands to check when your job runs, and use ls to locate the output file, and examine it.

Is it what you expected? How good is the value for pi?

Key Points

• Parallelism is an important feature of HPC clusters.

• MPI parallelism is a common case.

• The queuing system facilitates executing parallel tasks.