Executing Chapel Programs¶

Getting Help¶

Using the -h or --help flags will print out help for the executable. For example:

./a.out --help

This flag lists all of the standard flags that can be used with a Chapel program, as well as a list of the configuration variables defined by the program and their types. If the configuration variable has been set on the command line, its value is also shown.

Setting Configuration Variables¶

Configuration constants and variables defined in a Chapel program can have their default values overridden on the command line using the -s or -- flags. Either flag takes the name of the configuration variable followed by an equals character (=) and the value to assign to it. This value must be a legal Chapel literal for the type of the variable. (Exception: for a string literal, the surrounding quotes are implicit.) In our current implementation, no extra spaces may appear between these elements. Thus, the general form is:

./a.out --<cfgVar>=<val>

or:

./a.out -s<cfgVar>=<val>

As an example, compile the hello2-module.chpl example which prints a user-definable message:

chpl -o hello2-module $CHPL_HOME/examples/hello2-module.chpl

This program defines a configuration constant, message, indicating the string to print to the console, set to "Hello, world!" by default. To override the default, you can use:

./hello2-module --message='Hello, Chapel users!'

or:

./hello2-module -smessage='Hello, Chapel users!'

The default value of a configuration constant or variable can also be overridden at compilation time with a -s option. (The surrounding quotes must be provided for a string literal.) For example:

cd $CHPL_HOME/examples
chpl -smessage='"Hello from the Chapel compiler"' hello2-module.chpl

or:

chpl -s message="'Hello from the Chapel compiler'" hello2-module.chpl

The compiler-established default can still be overridden when executing the program, as shown above.

Chapel programs can also accept C-like command line arguments to their main() procedure in addition to the aforementioned configuration variables. See Support for main() Functions for more information.

Setting the Number of Locales¶

For multi-locale Chapel executions, the number of locales on which to execute a program is specified on the executable’s command-line. This can be set either using the -nl flag, or by assigning to the built-in numLocales configuration constant using the normal mechanisms. So, to execute on four locales, one could use:

./a.out -nl 4

or:

./a.out --numLocales=4

or:

./a.out -snumLocales=4

For users running with CHPL_COMM=none (the default), only one locale can be used. See Multilocale Chapel Execution for more information about executing on multiple locales.

Multi-locale programs often use a launcher executable to do some initial command-line checking before spawning the real program, which is then stored in a second binary named <original_binary_name>_real. See Chapel Launchers for more information about the launcher executable.

Controlling Degree of Data Parallelism¶

Data parallel operations over ranges, default domains, and default arrays permit the number of tasks used to implement the data parallelism to be specified using the following built-in configuration constants:

dataParTasksPerLocale

Number of Chapel tasks to use to execute forall loops (default: number of physical CPUs on the node, which may be reduced by CHPL_RT_NUM_THREADS_PER_LOCALE. When CHPL_TASKS=qthreads, CHPL_RT_NUM_THREADS_PER_LOCALE can also increase this, up to the number of logical CPUs).

dataParIgnoreRunningTasks

If true, always use dataParTasksPerLocale tasks to execute forall loops. If false, reduce the number of tasks used by the number of tasks already running (default: false).

dataParMinGranularity

The number of tasks used to execute forall loops should be reduced such that the number of iterations per task is never less than the specified value (default: 1).

Most Chapel standard distributions also use identically named constructor arguments to control the degree of data parallelism within each locale when iterating over its domains and arrays. The default values for these arguments are set to the corresponding global configuration constants.

Environment Variable Control over Chapel Behavior¶

Chapel uses environment variables to control the number of threads used at execution time and the call stack size, among other things. In many cases third-party packages used by Chapel define their own environment variables to provide the same or similar control. When this is the case, the Chapel environment variable has precedence over the third-party package environment variable, which in turn has precedence over the Chapel default.

As an example, with CHPL_TASKS=qthreads, Chapel and Qthreads both have environment variables that can be used to set the task stack size. In this case the Chapel CHPL_RT_CALL_STACK_SIZE environment variable will override the Qthreads QT_STACK_SIZE environment variable if both are set. However, if only QT_STACK_SIZE is set it will override the Chapel default call stack size.

The Chapel environment variables that control execution time behavior are as follows:

CHPL_RT_CALL_STACK_SIZE

size of the call stack for a task

CHPL_RT_MAX_HEAP_SIZE

per-locale size of the heap used for dynamic allocation in multilocale programs

CHPL_RT_NUM_THREADS_PER_LOCALE

number of threads used to execute tasks

There is a bit more information on CHPL_RT_CALL_STACK_SIZE and CHPL_RT_NUM_THREADS_PER_LOCALE below, and more detailed discussion of all of these in Chapel Tasks and Using Chapel on Cray Systems.

Controlling the Call Stack Size¶

The main Chapel program requires space for its call stack, as does any task created by it. This stack space has a fixed size. It is created automatically when the program or task starts executing, and remains in existence until it completes. The default call stack size is 8 MiB on Linux-based systems, since this is a common value for the process stack limit on such systems. On Cygwin systems the default call stack size is 2 MiB.

The default call stack size may not be appropriate in all cases. For programs in which some tasks have large stack frames or deep call trees it may be too small, leading to stack overflow. For programs which use tasks only for data parallelism it may be unnecessarily large. Stacks that are unnecessarily large are typically only a problem for programs in which many tasks (thus their stacks) exist at once, when using a comm layer that has to pre-register memory. For the particular case of using the native runtime communication and tasking layers on Cray X* systems, further discussion about this can be found in Using Chapel on Cray Systems.

The following environment variable can be used to change the task call stack size.

CHPL_RT_CALL_STACK_SIZE

Size of the call stack for a task. A plain numeric value indicates bytes. A suffix can be appended to indicate larger units:

k, K: KiB (2**10 bytes)

m, M: MiB (2**20 bytes)

g, G: GiB (2**30 bytes)

Controlling the Number of Threads¶

The following environment variable can be used to change the number of system threads used by a program.

CHPL_RT_NUM_THREADS_PER_LOCALE

Controls the number of threads used on each locale when running the program.

See Chapel Tasks for more information on the role of this variable in creating threads and executing tasks for the various tasking layers.

Controlling the Amount of Non-User Output¶

The compiler-generated executable supports verbose and quiet modes that control the amount of Chapel-generated information printed by the executable.

-v, --verbose	Print more information. For example, print the launcher commands used to start the program (if any) and print a message from each locale when the program starts executing there.
-q, --quiet	Print less information. For example, suppress run-time warnings that are printed by default.

Launcher Support¶

For multilocale execution (see Multilocale Chapel Execution), Chapel programs are executed indirectly by a launcher. This section covers command line options that assist launchers in doing their job. These options are not supported for general use. We document them here so that their presence in, say, the verbose output produced by -v can be understood.

At present there is only one launcher support option:

-E <envVar=val>
	set the given environment variable envVar to val.