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Configuring SimGrid



A number of options can be given at runtime to change the default SimGrid behavior. For a complete list of all configuration options accepted by the SimGrid version used in your simulator, simply pass the --help configuration flag to your program. If some of the options are not documented on this page, this is a bug that you should please report so that we can fix it. Note that some of the options presented here may not be available in your simulators, depending on the :ref:`compile-time options <install_src_config>` that you used.

Setting Configuration Items

There is several way to pass configuration options to the simulators. The most common way is to use the --cfg command line argument. For example, to set the item Item to the value Value, simply type the following on the command-line:

my_simulator --cfg=Item:Value (other arguments)

Several --cfg command line arguments can naturally be used. If you need to include spaces in the argument, don't forget to quote the argument. You can even escape the included quotes (write @' for ' if you have your argument between ').

Another solution is to use the <config> tag in the platform file. The only restriction is that this tag must occure before the first platform element (be it <zone>, <cluster>, <peer> or whatever). The <config> tag takes an id attribute, but it is currently ignored so you don't really need to pass it. The important part is that within that tag, you can pass one or several <prop> tags to specify the configuration to use. For example, setting Item to Value can be done by adding the following to the beginning of your platform file:

<config>
  <prop id="Item" value="Value"/>
</config>

A last solution is to pass your configuration directly in your program with :cpp:func:`simgrid::s4u::Engine::set_config` or :cpp:func:`MSG_config`.

#include <simgrid/s4u.hpp>

int main(int argc, char *argv[]) {
  simgrid::s4u::Engine e(&argc, argv);

  e->set_config("Item:Value");

  // Rest of your code
}

Existing Configuration Items

Note

The full list can be retrieved by passing --help and --help-cfg to an executable that uses SimGrid. Try passing help as a value to get the list of values accepted by a given option. For example, --cfg=plugin:help will give you the list of plugins available in your installation of SimGrid.

Configuring the Platform Models

Choosing the Platform Models

SimGrid comes with several network, CPU and storage models built in, and you can change the used model at runtime by changing the passed configuration. The three main configuration items are given below. For each of these items, passing the special help value gives you a short description of all possible values (for example, --cfg=network/model:help will present all provided network models). Also, --help-models should provide information about all models for all existing resources.

  • network/model: specify the used network model. Possible values:
  • cpu/model: specify the used CPU model. We have only one model for now:
    • Cas01: Simplistic CPU model (time=size/power)
  • host/model: The host concept is the aggregation of a CPU with a network card. Three models exists, but actually, only 2 of them are interesting. The "compound" one is simply due to the way our internal code is organized, and can easily be ignored. So at the end, you have two host models: The default one allows to aggregate an existing CPU model with an existing network model, but does not allow parallel tasks because these beasts need some collaboration between the network and CPU model. That is why, ptask_07 is used by default when using SimDag.
    • default: Default host model. Currently, CPU:Cas01 and network:LV08 (with cross traffic enabled)
    • compound: Host model that is automatically chosen if you change the network and CPU models
    • ptask_L07: Host model somehow similar to Cas01+CM02 but allowing "parallel tasks", that are intended to model the moldable tasks of the grid scheduling literature.
  • storage/model: specify the used storage model. Only one model is provided so far.
  • vm/model: specify the model for virtual machines. Only one model is provided so far.

Optimization Level

The network and CPU models that are based on lmm_solve (that is, all our analytical models) accept specific optimization configurations.

  • items network/optim and cpu/optim (both default to 'Lazy'):
    • Lazy: Lazy action management (partial invalidation in lmm + heap in action remaining).
    • TI: Trace integration. Highly optimized mode when using availability traces (only available for the Cas01 CPU model for now).
    • Full: Full update of remaining and variables. Slow but may be useful when debugging.
  • items network/maxmin-selective-update and cpu/maxmin-selective-update: configure whether the underlying should be lazily updated or not. It should have no impact on the computed timings, but should speed up the computation.
    It is still possible to disable this feature because it can reveal counter-productive in very specific scenarios where the interaction level is high. In particular, if all your communication share a given backbone link, you should disable it: without it, a simple regular loop is used to update each communication. With it, each of them is still updated (because of the dependency induced by the backbone), but through a complicated and slow pattern that follows the actual dependencies.

Numerical Precision

Option maxmin/precision Default: 0.00001 (in flops or bytes)
Option surf/precision Default: 0.00001 (in seconds)

The analytical models handle a lot of floating point values. It is possible to change the epsilon used to update and compare them through this configuration item. Changing it may speedup the simulation by discarding very small actions, at the price of a reduced numerical precision. You can modify separately the precision used to manipulate timings (in seconds) and the one used to manipulate amounts of work (in flops or bytes).

Concurrency Limit

Option maxmin/concurrency-limit Default: -1 (no limit)

The maximum number of variables per resource can be tuned through this option. You can have as many simultaneous actions per resources as you want. If your simulation presents a very high level of concurrency, it may help to use e.g. 100 as a value here. It means that at most 100 actions can consume a resource at a given time. The extraneous actions are queued and wait until the amount of concurrency of the considered resource lowers under the given boundary.

Such limitations help both to the simulation speed and simulation accuracy on highly constrained scenarios, but the simulation speed suffers of this setting on regular (less constrained) scenarios so it is off by default.

Configuring the Network Model

Maximal TCP Window Size

Option network/TCP-gamma Default: 4194304

The analytical models need to know the maximal TCP window size to take the TCP congestion mechanism into account. On Linux, this value can be retrieved using the following commands. Both give a set of values, and you should use the last one, which is the maximal size.

cat /proc/sys/net/ipv4/tcp_rmem # gives the sender window
cat /proc/sys/net/ipv4/tcp_wmem # gives the receiver window

Correcting Important Network Parameters

SimGrid can take network irregularities such as a slow startup or changing behavior depending on the message size into account. You should not change these values unless you really know what you're doing. The corresponding values were computed through data fitting one the timings of packet-level simulators, as described in Accuracy Study and Improvement of Network Simulation in the SimGrid Framework.

If you are using the SMPI model, these correction coefficients are themselves corrected by constant values depending on the size of the exchange. By default SMPI uses factors computed on the Stampede Supercomputer at TACC, with optimal deployment of processes on nodes. Again, only hardcore experts should bother about this fact.

InfiniBand network behavior can be modeled through 3 parameters smpi/IB-penalty-factors:"βe;βs;γs", as explained in this PhD thesis.

.. todo:: This section should be rewritten, and actually explain the
          options network/bandwidth-factor, network/latency-factor,
          network/weight-S.

Simulating Cross-Traffic

Since SimGrid v3.7, cross-traffic effects can be taken into account in analytical simulations. It means that ongoing and incoming communication flows are treated independently. In addition, the LV08 model adds 0.05 of usage on the opposite direction for each new created flow. This can be useful to simulate some important TCP phenomena such as ack compression.

For that to work, your platform must have two links for each pair of interconnected hosts. An example of usable platform is available in examples/platforms/crosstraffic.xml.

This is activated through the network/crosstraffic item, that can be set to 0 (disable this feature) or 1 (enable it).

Note that with the default host model this option is activated by default.

Simulating Asyncronous Send

(this configuration item is experimental and may change or disapear)

It is possible to specify that messages below a certain size will be sent as soon as the call to MPI_Send is issued, without waiting for the correspondant receive. This threshold can be configured through the smpi/async-small-thresh item. The default value is 0. This behavior can also be manually set for mailboxes, by setting the receiving mode of the mailbox with a call to :cpp:func:`MSG_mailbox_set_async`. After this, all messages sent to this mailbox will have this behavior regardless of the message size.

This value needs to be smaller than or equals to the threshold set at :ref:`cfg=smpi/send-is-detached-thresh`, because asynchronous messages are meant to be detached as well.

Configuring ns-3

Option ns3/TcpModel Default: "default" (ns-3 default)

When using ns-3, there is an extra item ns3/TcpModel, corresponding to the ns3::TcpL4Protocol::SocketType configuration item in ns-3. The only valid values (enforced on the SimGrid side) are 'default' (no change to the ns-3 configuration), 'NewReno' or 'Reno' or 'Tahoe'.

Configuring the Storage model

File Descriptor Cound per Host

Option storage/max_file_descriptors Default: 1024

Each host maintains a fixed-size array of its file descriptors. You can change its size through this item to either enlarge it if your application requires it or to reduce it to save memory space.

Activating Plugins

SimGrid plugins allow to extend the framework without changing its source code directly. Read the source code of the existing plugins to learn how to do so (in src/plugins), and ask your questions to the usual channels (Stack Overflow, Mailing list, IRC). The basic idea is that plugins usually register callbacks to some signals of interest. If they need to store some information about a given object (Link, CPU or Actor), they do so through the use of a dedicated object extension.

Some of the existing plugins can be activated from the command line, meaning that you can activate them from the command line without any modification to your simulation code. For example, you can activate the host energy plugin by adding --cfg=plugin:host_energy to your command line.

Here is the full list of plugins that can be activated this way:

  • host_energy: keeps track of the energy dissipated by computations. More details in @ref plugin_energy.
  • link_energy: keeps track of the energy dissipated by communications. More details in @ref SURF_plugin_energy.
  • host_load: keeps track of the computational load. More details in @ref plugin_load.

Configuring the Model-Checking

To enable the SimGrid model-checking support the program should be executed using the simgrid-mc wrapper:

simgrid-mc ./my_program

Safety properties are expressed as assertions using the function :cpp:func:`void MC_assert(int prop)`.

Specifying the MPI buffering behavior

Option smpi/buffering Default: infty

Buffering in MPI has a huge impact on the communication semantic. For example, standard blocking sends are synchronous calls when the system buffers are full while these calls can complete immediately without even requiring a matching receive call for small messages sent when the system buffers are empty.

In SMPI, this depends on the message size, that is compared against two thresholds:

The smpi/buffering option gives an easier interface to choose between these semantics. It can take two values:

  • zero: means that buffering should be disabled. Blocking communications are actually blocking.
  • infty: means that buffering should be made infinite. Blocking communications are non-blocking.

Specifying a liveness property

Option model-check/property Default: unset

If you want to specify liveness properties, you have to pass them on the command line, specifying the name of the file containing the property, as formatted by the ltl2ba program.

simgrid-mc ./my_program --cfg=model-check/property:<filename>

Going for Stateful Verification

By default, the system is backtracked to its initial state to explore another path instead of backtracking to the exact step before the fork that we want to explore (this is called stateless verification). This is done this way because saving intermediate states can rapidly exhaust the available memory. If you want, you can change the value of the model-check/checkpoint item. For example, --cfg=model-check/checkpoint:1 asks to take a checkpoint every step. Beware, this will certainly explode your memory. Larger values are probably better, make sure to experiment a bit to find the right setting for your specific system.

Specifying the kind of reduction

The main issue when using the model-checking is the state space explosion. To counter that problem, you can chose a exploration reduction techniques with --cfg=model-check/reduction:<technique>. For now, this configuration variable can take 2 values:

  • none: Do not apply any kind of reduction (mandatory for now for liveness properties)
  • dpor: Apply Dynamic Partial Ordering Reduction. Only valid if you verify local safety properties (default value for safety checks).

There is unfortunately no silver bullet here, and the most efficient reduction techniques cannot be applied to any properties. In particular, the DPOR method cannot be applied on liveness properties since our implementation of DPOR may break some cycles, while cycles are very important to the soundness of the exploration for liveness properties.

Size of Cycle Detection Set

In order to detect cycles, the model-checker needs to check if a new explored state is in fact the same state than a previous one. For that, the model-checker can take a snapshot of each visited state: this snapshot is then used to compare it with subsequent states in the exploration graph.

The model-check/visited item is the maximum number of states which are stored in memory. If the maximum number of snapshotted state is reached, some states will be removed from the memory and some cycles might be missed. Small values can lead to incorrect verifications, but large value can exhaust your memory, so choose carefully.

By default, no state is snapshotted and cycles cannot be detected.

Non-Termination Detection

The model-check/termination configuration item can be used to report if a non-termination execution path has been found. This is a path with a cycle which means that the program might never terminate.

This only works in safety mode, not in liveness mode.

This options is disabled by default.

Dot Output

If set, the model-check/dot-output configuration item is the name of a file in which to write a dot file of the path leading the found property (safety or liveness violation) as well as the cycle for liveness properties. This dot file can then fed to the graphviz dot tool to generate an corresponding graphical representation.

Exploration Depth Limit

The model-checker/max-depth can set the maximum depth of the exploration graph of the model-checker. If this limit is reached, a logging message is sent and the results might not be exact.

By default, there is not depth limit.

Handling of Timeouts

By default, the model-checker does not handle timeout conditions: the wait operations never time out. With the model-check/timeout configuration item set to yes, the model-checker will explore timeouts of wait operations.

Communication Determinism

The model-check/communications-determinism and model-check/send-determinism items can be used to select the communication determinism mode of the model-checker which checks determinism properties of the communications of an application.

Verification Performance Considerations

The size of the stacks can have a huge impact on the memory consumption when using model-checking. By default, each snapshot will save a copy of the whole stacks and not only of the part which is really meaningful: you should expect the contribution of the memory consumption of the snapshots to be @f$ @mbox{number of processes} @times @mbox{stack size} @times @mbox{number of states} @f$.

When compiled against the model checker, the stacks are not protected with guards: if the stack size is too small for your application, the stack will silently overflow on other parts of the memory (see :ref:`contexts/guard-size <cfg=contexts/guard-size>`).

Replaying buggy execution paths out of the model-checker

Debugging the problems reported by the model-checker is challenging: First, the application under verification cannot be debugged with gdb because the model-checker already traces it. Then, the model-checker may explore several execution paths before encountering the issue, making it very difficult to understand the outputs. Fortunately, SimGrid provides the execution path leading to any reported issue so that you can replay this path out of the model checker, enabling the usage of classical debugging tools.

When the model-checker finds an interesting path in the application execution graph (where a safety or liveness property is violated), it generates an identifier for this path. Here is an example of output:

[  0.000000] (0:@) Check a safety property
[  0.000000] (0:@) **************************
[  0.000000] (0:@) *** PROPERTY NOT VALID ***
[  0.000000] (0:@) **************************
[  0.000000] (0:@) Counter-example execution trace:
[  0.000000] (0:@)   [(1)Tremblay (app)] MC_RANDOM(3)
[  0.000000] (0:@)   [(1)Tremblay (app)] MC_RANDOM(4)
[  0.000000] (0:@) Path = 1/3;1/4
[  0.000000] (0:@) Expanded states = 27
[  0.000000] (0:@) Visited states = 68
[  0.000000] (0:@) Executed transitions = 46

The interesting line is Path = 1/3;1/4, which means that you should use --cfg=model-check/replay:1/3;1/4 to replay your application on the buggy execution path. All options (but the model-checker related ones) must remain the same. In particular, if you ran your application with smpirun -wrapper simgrid-mc, then do it again. Remove all MC-related options, keep the other ones and add --cfg=model-check/replay.

Currently, if the path is of the form X;Y;Z, each number denotes the actor's pid that is selected at each indecision point. If it's of the form X/a;Y/b, the X and Y are the selected pids while the a and b are the return values of their simcalls. In the previouse example, 1/3;1/4, you can see from the full output that the actor 1 is doing MC_RANDOM simcalls, so the 3 and 4 simply denote the values that these simcall return.

Configuring the User Code Virtualization

Selecting the Virtualization Factory

Option contexts/factory Default: "raw"

In SimGrid, the user code is virtualized in a specific mechanism that allows the simulation kernel to control its execution: when a user process requires a blocking action (such as sending a message), it is interrupted, and only gets released when the simulated clock reaches the point where the blocking operation is done. This is explained graphically in the relevant tutorial, available online.

In SimGrid, the containers in which user processes are virtualized are called contexts. Several context factory are provided, and you can select the one you want to use with the contexts/factory configuration item. Some of the following may not exist on your machine because of portability issues. In any case, the default one should be the most effcient one (please report bugs if the auto-detection fails for you). They are approximately sorted here from the slowest to the most efficient:

  • thread: very slow factory using full featured threads (either pthreads or windows native threads). They are slow but very standard. Some debuggers or profilers only work with this factory.
  • java: Java applications are virtualized onto java threads (that are regular pthreads registered to the JVM)
  • ucontext: fast factory using System V contexts (Linux and FreeBSD only)
  • boost: This uses the context implementation of the boost library for a performance that is comparable to our raw implementation.
    Install the relevant library (e.g. with the libboost-contexts-dev package on Debian/Ubuntu) and recompile SimGrid.
  • raw: amazingly fast factory using a context switching mechanism of our own, directly implemented in assembly (only available for x86 and amd64 platforms for now) and without any unneeded system call.

The main reason to change this setting is when the debugging tools get fooled by the optimized context factories. Threads are the most debugging-friendly contextes, as they allow to set breakpoints anywhere with gdb and visualize backtraces for all processes, in order to debug concurrency issues. Valgrind is also more comfortable with threads, but it should be usable with all factories (Exception: the callgrind tool really dislikes raw and ucontext factories).

Adapting the Stack Size

Option contexts/stack-size Default: 8192 KiB

Each virtualized used process is executed using a specific system stack. The size of this stack has a huge impact on the simulation scalability, but its default value is rather large. This is because the error messages that you get when the stack size is too small are rather disturbing: this leads to stack overflow (overwriting other stacks), leading to segfaults with corrupted stack traces.

If you want to push the scalability limits of your code, you might want to reduce the contexts/stack-size item. Its default value is 8192 (in KiB), while our Chord simulation works with stacks as small as 16 KiB, for example. This setting is ignored when using the thread factory. Instead, you should compile SimGrid and your application with -fsplit-stack. Note that this compilation flag is not compatible with the model-checker right now.

The operating system should only allocate memory for the pages of the stack which are actually used and you might not need to use this in most cases. However, this setting is very important when using the model checker (see :ref:`options_mc_perf`).

Disabling Stack Guard Pages

Option contexts/guard-size Default 1 page in most case (0 pages on Windows or with MC)

Unless you use the threads context factory (see :ref:`cfg=contexts/factory`), a stack guard page is usually used which prevents the stack of a given actor from overflowing on another stack. But the performance impact may become prohibitive when the amount of actors increases. The option contexts/guard-size is the number of stack guard pages used. By setting it to 0, no guard pages will be used: in this case, you should avoid using small stacks (with :ref:`contexts/stack-size <cfg=contexts/stack-size>`) as the stack will silently overflow on other parts of the memory.

When no stack guard page is created, stacks may then silently overflow on other parts of the memory if their size is too small for the application.

Running User Code in Parallel

Parallel execution of the user code is only considered stable in SimGrid v3.7 and higher, and mostly for MSG simulations. SMPI simulations may well fail in parallel mode. It is described in INRIA RR-7653.

If you are using the ucontext or raw context factories, you can request to execute the user code in parallel. Several threads are launched, each of them handling as much user contexts at each run. To actiave this, set the contexts/nthreads item to the amount of cores that you have in your computer (or lower than 1 to have the amount of cores auto-detected).

Even if you asked several worker threads using the previous option, you can request to start the parallel execution (and pay the associated synchronization costs) only if the potential parallelism is large enough. For that, set the contexts/parallel-threshold item to the minimal amount of user contexts needed to start the parallel execution. In any given simulation round, if that amount is not reached, the contexts will be run sequentially directly by the main thread (thus saving the synchronization costs). Note that this option is mainly useful when the grain of the user code is very fine, because our synchronization is now very efficient.

When parallel execution is activated, you can choose the synchronization schema used with the contexts/synchro item, which value is either:

  • futex: ultra optimized synchronisation schema, based on futexes (fast user-mode mutexes), and thus only available on Linux systems. This is the default mode when available.
  • posix: slow but portable synchronisation using only POSIX primitives.
  • busy_wait: not really a synchronisation: the worker threads constantly request new contexts to execute. It should be the most efficient synchronisation schema, but it loads all the cores of your machine for no good reason. You probably prefer the other less eager schemas.

Configuring the Tracing

The :ref:`tracing subsystem <outcomes_vizu>` can be configured in several different ways depending on the nature of the simulator (MSG, SimDag, SMPI) and the kind of traces that need to be obtained. See the :ref:`Tracing Configuration Options subsection <tracing_tracing_options>` to get a detailed description of each configuration option.

We detail here a simple way to get the traces working for you, even if you never used the tracing API.

  • Any SimGrid-based simulator (MSG, SimDag, SMPI, ...) and raw traces:

    --cfg=tracing:yes --cfg=tracing/uncategorized:yes --cfg=triva/uncategorized:uncat.plist

    The first parameter activates the tracing subsystem, the second tells it to trace host and link utilization (without any categorization) and the third creates a graph configuration file to configure Triva when analysing the resulting trace file.

  • MSG or SimDag-based simulator and categorized traces (you need to declare categories and classify your tasks according to them)

    --cfg=tracing:yes --cfg=tracing/categorized:yes --cfg=triva/categorized:cat.plist

    The first parameter activates the tracing subsystem, the second tells it to trace host and link categorized utilization and the third creates a graph configuration file to configure Triva when analysing the resulting trace file.

  • SMPI simulator and traces for a space/time view:

    smpirun -trace ...

    The -trace parameter for the smpirun script runs the simulation with --cfg=tracing:yes --cfg=tracing/smpi:yes. Check the smpirun's -help parameter for additional tracing options.

Sometimes you might want to put additional information on the trace to correctly identify them later, or to provide data that can be used to reproduce an experiment. You have two ways to do that:

  • Add a string on top of the trace file as comment:

    --cfg=tracing/comment:my_simulation_identifier

  • Add the contents of a textual file on top of the trace file as comment:

    --cfg=tracing/comment-file:my_file_with_additional_information.txt

Please, use these two parameters (for comments) to make reproducible simulations. For additional details about this and all tracing options, check See the :ref:`tracing_tracing_options`.

Configuring MSG

Debugging MSG Code

Option msg/debug-multiple-use Default: off

Sometimes your application may try to send a task that is still being executed somewhere else, making it impossible to send this task. However, for debugging purposes, one may want to know what the other host is/was doing. This option shows a backtrace of the other process.

Configuring SMPI

The SMPI interface provides several specific configuration items. These are uneasy to see since the code is usually launched through the smiprun script directly.

Automatic Benchmarking of SMPI Code

In SMPI, the sequential code is automatically benchmarked, and these computations are automatically reported to the simulator. That is to say that if you have a large computation between a MPI_Recv() and a MPI_Send(), SMPI will automatically benchmark the duration of this code, and create an execution task within the simulator to take this into account. For that, the actual duration is measured on the host machine and then scaled to the power of the corresponding simulated machine. The variable smpi/host-speed allows to specify the computational speed of the host machine (in flop/s) to use when scaling the execution times. It defaults to 20000, but you really want to update it to get accurate simulation results.

When the code is constituted of numerous consecutive MPI calls, the previous mechanism feeds the simulation kernel with numerous tiny computations. The smpi/cpu-threshold item becomes handy when this impacts badly the simulation performance. It specifies a threshold (in seconds) below which the execution chunks are not reported to the simulation kernel (default value: 1e-6).

Note

The option smpi/cpu-threshold ignores any computation time spent below this threshold. SMPI does not consider the amount of these computations; there is no offset for this. Hence, a value that is too small, may lead to unreliable simulation results.

In some cases, however, one may wish to disable simulation of application computation. This is the case when SMPI is used not to simulate an MPI applications, but instead an MPI code that performs "live replay" of another MPI app (e.g., ScalaTrace's replay tool, various on-line simulators that run an app at scale). In this case the computation of the replay/simulation logic should not be simulated by SMPI. Instead, the replay tool or on-line simulator will issue "computation events", which correspond to the actual MPI simulation being replayed/simulated. At the moment, these computation events can be simulated using SMPI by calling internal smpi_execute*() functions.

To disable the benchmarking/simulation of computation in the simulated application, the variable smpi/simulate-computation should be set to no. This option just ignores the timings in your simulation; it still executes the computations itself. If you want to stop SMPI from doing that, you should check the SMPI_SAMPLE macros, documented in Section :ref:`SMPI_adapting_speed`.

Solution Computations executed? Computations simulated?
--cfg=smpi/simulate-computation:no Yes Never
--cfg=smpi/cpu-threshold:42 Yes, in all cases If it lasts over 42 seconds
SMPI_SAMPLE() macro Only once per loop nest Always

Slow-down or speed-up parts of your code

Option smpi/comp-adjustment-file: Default: unset

This option allows you to pass a file that contains two columns: The first column defines the section that will be subject to a speedup; the second column is the speedup. For instance:

"start:stop","ratio"
"exchange_1.f:30:exchange_1.f:130",1.18244559422142

The first line is the header - you must include it. The following line means that the code between two consecutive MPI calls on line 30 in exchange_1.f and line 130 in exchange_1.f should receive a speedup of 1.18244559422142. The value for the second column is therefore a speedup, if it is larger than 1 and a slow-down if it is smaller than 1. Nothing will be changed if it is equal to 1.

Of course, you can set any arbitrary filenames you want (so the start and end don't have to be in the same file), but be aware that this mechanism only supports consecutive calls!

Please note that you must pass the -trace-call-location flag to smpicc or smpiff, respectively. This flag activates some internal macro definitions that help with obtaining the call location.

Bandwidth Factors

Option smpi/bw-factor
Default: 65472:0.940694;15424:0.697866;9376:0.58729;5776:1.08739;3484:0.77493;1426:0.608902;732:0.341987;257:0.338112;0:0.812084

The possible throughput of network links is often dependent on the message sizes, as protocols may adapt to different message sizes. With this option, a series of message sizes and factors are given, helping the simulation to be more realistic. For instance, the current default value means that messages with size 65472 and more will get a total of MAX_BANDWIDTH*0.940694, messages of size 15424 to 65471 will get MAX_BANDWIDTH*0.697866 and so on (where MAX_BANDWIDTH denotes the bandwidth of the link).

An experimental script to compute these factors is available online. See https://framagit.org/simgrid/platform-calibration/ https://simgrid.org/contrib/smpi-saturation-doc.html

Reporting Simulation Time

Option smpi/display-timing Default: 0 (false)

Most of the time, you run MPI code with SMPI to compute the time it would take to run it on a platform. But since the code is run through the smpirun script, you don't have any control on the launcher code, making it difficult to report the simulated time when the simulation ends. If you enable the smpi/display-timing item, smpirun will display this information when the simulation ends.

Keeping temporary files after simulation

Option smpi/keep-temps default: 0 (false)

SMPI usually generates a lot of temporary files that are cleaned after use. This option request to preserve them, for example to debug or profile your code. Indeed, the binary files are removed very early under the dlopen privatization schema, which tend to fool the debuggers.

Latency factors

Option smpi/lat-factor
default: 65472:11.6436;15424:3.48845;9376:2.59299;5776:2.18796;3484:1.88101;1426:1.61075;732:1.9503;257:1.95341;0:2.01467

The motivation and syntax for this option is identical to the motivation/syntax of :ref:`cfg=smpi/bw-factor`.

There is an important difference, though: While smpi/bw-factor reduces the actual bandwidth (i.e., values between 0 and 1 are valid), latency factors increase the latency, i.e., values larger than or equal to 1 are valid here.

Trace hardware counters with PAPI

Option smpi/papi-events default: unset

When the PAPI support was compiled in SimGrid, this option takes the names of PAPI counters and adds their respective values to the trace files (See Section :ref:`tracing_tracing_options`).

Warning

This feature currently requires superuser privileges, as registers are queried. Only use this feature with code you trust! Call smpirun for instance via smpirun -wrapper "sudo " <your-parameters> or run sudo sh -c "echo 0 > /proc/sys/kernel/perf_event_paranoid" In the later case, sudo will not be required.

It is planned to make this feature available on a per-process (or per-thread?) basis. The first draft, however, just implements a "global" (i.e., for all processes) set of counters, the "default" set.

--cfg=smpi/papi-events:"default:PAPI_L3_LDM:PAPI_L2_LDM"

Automatic Privatization of Global Variables

Option smpi/privatization default: "dlopen" (when using smpirun)

MPI executables are usually meant to be executed in separated processes, but SMPI is executed in only one process. Global variables from executables will be placed in the same memory zone and shared between processes, causing intricate bugs. Several options are possible to avoid this, as described in the main SMPI publication and in the :ref:`SMPI documentation <SMPI_what_globals>`. SimGrid provides two ways of automatically privatizing the globals, and this option allows to choose between them.

  • no (default when not using smpirun): Do not automatically privatize variables. Pass -no-privatize to smpirun to disable this feature.
  • dlopen or yes (default when using smpirun): Link multiple times against the binary.
  • mmap (slower, but maybe somewhat more stable): Runtime automatic switching of the data segments.

Warning

This configuration option cannot be set in your platform file. You can only pass it as an argument to smpirun.

Automatic privatization of global variables inside external libraries

Option smpi/privatize-libs default: unset

Linux/BSD only: When using dlopen (default) privatization, privatize specific shared libraries with internal global variables, if they can't be linked statically. For example libgfortran is usually used for Fortran I/O and indexes in files can be mixed up.

Multiple libraries can be given, semicolon separated.

This configuration option can only use either full paths to libraries, or full names. Check with ldd the name of the library you want to use. Example:

ldd allpairf90
   ...
   libgfortran.so.3 => /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libgfortran.so.3 (0x00007fbb4d91b000)
   ...

Then you can use --cfg=smpi/privatize-libs:libgfortran.so.3 or --cfg=smpi/privatize-libs:/usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libgfortran.so.3, but not libgfortran nor libgfortran.so.

Simulating MPI detached send

Option smpi/send-is-detached-thresh default: 65536

This threshold specifies the size in bytes under which the send will return immediately. This is different from the threshold detailed in :ref:`cfg=smpi/async-small-thresh` because the message is not effectively sent when the send is posted. SMPI still waits for the correspondant receive to be posted to perform the communication operation.

Simulating MPI collective algorithms

Option smpi/coll-selector Possible values: naive (default), ompi, mpich

SMPI implements more than 100 different algorithms for MPI collective communication, to accurately simulate the behavior of most of the existing MPI libraries. The smpi/coll-selector item can be used to use the decision logic of either OpenMPI or MPICH libraries (by default SMPI uses naive version of collective operations).

Each collective operation can be manually selected with a smpi/collective_name:algo_name. Available algorithms are listed in :ref:`SMPI_use_colls`.

.. TODO:: All available collective algorithms will be made available
          via the ``smpirun --help-coll`` command.

Inject constant times for MPI_Iprobe

Option smpi/iprobe default: 0.0001

The behavior and motivation for this configuration option is identical with :ref:`smpi/test <cfg=smpi/test>`, but for the function MPI_Iprobe()

Reduce speed for iprobe calls

Option smpi/iprobe-cpu-usage default: 1 (no change)

MPI_Iprobe calls can be heavily used in applications. To account correctly for the energy cores spend probing, it is necessary to reduce the load that these calls cause inside SimGrid.

For instance, we measured a max power consumption of 220 W for a particular application but only 180 W while this application was probing. Hence, the correct factor that should be passed to this option would be 180/220 = 0.81.

Inject constant times for MPI_Init

Option smpi/init default: 0

The behavior and motivation for this configuration option is identical with :ref:`smpi/test <cfg=smpi/test>`, but for the function MPI_Init().

Inject constant times for MPI_Isend()

Option smpi/ois

The behavior and motivation for this configuration option is identical with :ref:`smpi/os <cfg=smpi/os>`, but for the function MPI_Isend().

Inject constant times for MPI_send()

Option smpi/os

In several network models such as LogP, send (MPI_Send, MPI_Isend) and receive (MPI_Recv) operations incur costs (i.e., they consume CPU time). SMPI can factor these costs in as well, but the user has to configure SMPI accordingly as these values may vary by machine. This can be done by using smpi/os for MPI_Send operations; for MPI_Isend and MPI_Recv, use smpi/ois and smpi/or, respectively. These work exactly as smpi/ois.

This item can consist of multiple sections; each section takes three values, for example 1:3:2;10:5:1. The sections are divided by ";" so this example contains two sections. Furthermore, each section consists of three values.

  1. The first value denotes the minimum size for this section to take effect; read it as "if message size is greater than this value (and other section has a larger first value that is also smaller than the message size), use this". In the first section above, this value is "1".
  2. The second value is the startup time; this is a constant value that will always be charged, no matter what the size of the message. In the first section above, this value is "3".
  3. The third value is the per-byte cost. That is, it is charged for every byte of the message (incurring cost messageSize*cost_per_byte) and hence accounts also for larger messages. In the first section of the example above, this value is "2".

Now, SMPI always checks which section it should take for a given message; that is, if a message of size 11 is sent with the configuration of the example above, only the second section will be used, not the first, as the first value of the second section is closer to the message size. Hence, when smpi/os=1:3:2;10:5:1, a message of size 11 incurs the following cost inside MPI_Send: 5+11*1 because 5 is the startup cost and 1 is the cost per byte.

Note that the order of sections can be arbitrary; they will be ordered internally.

Inject constant times for MPI_Recv()

Option smpi/or

The behavior and motivation for this configuration option is identical with :ref:`smpi/os <cfg=smpi/os>`, but for the function MPI_Recv().

Inject constant times for MPI_Test

Option smpi/test default: 0.0001

By setting this option, you can control the amount of time a process sleeps when MPI_Test() is called; this is important, because SimGrid normally only advances the time while communication is happening and thus, MPI_Test will not add to the time, resulting in a deadlock if used as a break-condition as in the following example:

while(!flag) {
    MPI_Test(request, flag, status);
    ...
}

To speed up execution, we use a counter to keep track on how often we already checked if the handle is now valid or not. Hence, we actually use counter*SLEEP_TIME, that is, the time MPI_Test() causes the process to sleep increases linearly with the number of previously failed tests. This behavior can be disabled by setting smpi/grow-injected-times to no. This will also disable this behavior for MPI_Iprobe.

Factorize malloc()s

Option smpi/shared-malloc Possible values: global (default), local

If your simulation consumes too much memory, you may want to modify your code so that the working areas are shared by all MPI ranks. For example, in a bloc-cyclic matrix multiplication, you will only allocate one set of blocs, and every processes will share them. Naturally, this will lead to very wrong results, but this will save a lot of memory so this is still desirable for some studies. For more on the motivation for that feature, please refer to the relevant section of the SMPI CourseWare (see Activity #2.2 of the pointed assignment). In practice, change the call to malloc() and free() into SMPI_SHARED_MALLOC() and SMPI_SHARED_FREE().

SMPI provides two algorithms for this feature. The first one, called local, allocates one bloc per call to SMPI_SHARED_MALLOC() in your code (each call location gets its own bloc) and this bloc is shared amongst all MPI ranks. This is implemented with the shm_* functions to create a new POSIX shared memory object (kept in RAM, in /dev/shm) for each shared bloc.

With the global algorithm, each call to SMPI_SHARED_MALLOC() returns a new adress, but it only points to a shadow bloc: its memory area is mapped on a 1MiB file on disk. If the returned bloc is of size N MiB, then the same file is mapped N times to cover the whole bloc. At the end, no matter how many SMPI_SHARED_MALLOC you do, this will only consume 1 MiB in memory.

You can disable this behavior and come back to regular mallocs (for example for debugging purposes) using @c "no" as a value.

If you want to keep private some parts of the buffer, for instance if these parts are used by the application logic and should not be corrupted, you can use SMPI_PARTIAL_SHARED_MALLOC(size, offsets, offsets_count). Example:

mem = SMPI_PARTIAL_SHARED_MALLOC(500, {27,42 , 100,200}, 2);

This will allocate 500 bytes to mem, such that mem[27..41] and mem[100..199] are shared while other area remain private.

Then, it can be deallocated by calling SMPI_SHARED_FREE(mem).

When smpi/shared-malloc:global is used, the memory consumption problem is solved, but it may induce too much load on the kernel's pages table. In this case, you should use huge pages so that we create only one entry per Mb of malloced data instead of one entry per 4k. To activate this, you must mount a hugetlbfs on your system and allocate at least one huge page:

mkdir /home/huge
sudo mount none /home/huge -t hugetlbfs -o rw,mode=0777
sudo sh -c 'echo 1 > /proc/sys/vm/nr_hugepages' # echo more if you need more

Then, you can pass the option --cfg=smpi/shared-malloc-hugepage:/home/huge to smpirun to actually activate the huge page support in shared mallocs.

Inject constant times for MPI_Wtime, gettimeofday and clock_gettime

Option smpi/wtime default: 10 ns

This option controls the amount of (simulated) time spent in calls to MPI_Wtime(), gettimeofday() and clock_gettime(). If you set this value to 0, the simulated clock is not advanced in these calls, which leads to issue if your application contains such a loop:

while(MPI_Wtime() < some_time_bound) {
     /* some tests, with no communication nor computation */
}

When the option smpi/wtime is set to 0, the time advances only on communications and computations, so the previous code results in an infinite loop: the current [simulated] time will never reach some_time_bound. This infinite loop is avoided when that option is set to a small amount, as it is by default since SimGrid v3.21.

Note that if your application does not contain any loop depending on the current time only, then setting this option to a non-zero value will slow down your simulations by a tiny bit: the simulation loop has to be broken and reset each time your code ask for the current time. If the simulation speed really matters to you, you can avoid this extra delay by setting smpi/wtime to 0.

Other Configurations

Cleanup at Termination

Option debug/clean-atexit default: on

If your code is segfaulting during its finalization, it may help to disable this option to request SimGrid to not attempt any cleanups at the end of the simulation. Since the Unix process is ending anyway, the operating system will wipe it all.

Search Path

Option path default: . (current dir)

It is possible to specify a list of directories to search into for the trace files (see :ref:`pf_trace`) by using this configuration item. To add several directory to the path, set the configuration item several times, as in --cfg=path:toto --cfg=path:tutu

Set a Breakpoint

Option debug/breakpoint default: unset

This configuration option sets a breakpoint: when the simulated clock reaches the given time, a SIGTRAP is raised. This can be used to stop the execution and get a backtrace with a debugger.

It is also possible to set the breakpoint from inside the debugger, by writing in global variable simgrid::simix::breakpoint. For example, with gdb:

set variable simgrid::simix::breakpoint = 3.1416

Behavior on Ctrl-C

Option debug/verbose-exit default: on

By default, when Ctrl-C is pressed, the status of all existing actors is displayed before exiting the simulation. This is very useful to debug your code, but it can reveal troublesome if you have many actors. Set this configuration item to off to disable this feature.

Truncate local path from exception backtrace

Option exception/cutpath default: off

This configuration option is used to remove the path from the backtrace shown when an exception is thrown. This is mainly useful for the tests: the full file path makes the tests not reproducible because the path of source files depend of the build settings. That would break most of our tests as we keep comparing output.

Logging Configuration

It can be done by using XBT. Go to :ref:`XBT_log` for more details.