Using the Portable UDP Conduit

This document describes how to run Chapel across multiple machines in a portable manner using UDP for communication. This strategy is appropriate for machines only connected by Ethernet, for example. See also Multilocale Chapel Execution which describes general information about running Chapel in a multilocale configuration.

The UDP conduit is a portion of the GASNet networking library. See What is GASNet? for more information about GASNet.

Note

While the UDP conduit can help get multilocale Chapel programs running in a variety of environments, it is not expected to achieve the best performance. It is implemented for portability rather than for maximum performance.

To build Chapel with the UDP conduit, run these commands from $CHPL_HOME:

export CHPL_COMM=gasnet
export CHPL_COMM_SUBSTRATE=udp
make

Now you should be able to compile a program:

chpl -o hello6-taskpar-dist $CHPL_HOME/examples/hello6-taskpar-dist.chpl

But, in order to run this program, you’ll need to indicate where the multi-locale program should run.

First, try running it locally:

# Run over-subscribed on this machine
export GASNET_SPAWNFN=L
./hello6-taskpar-dist -nl 2

You should see output from 2 locales that both report the same hostname. This configuration simulates multiple Chapel locales with one workstation. This configuration is useful for testing but is not expected to perform well.

Next, try running it across several machines.

# Use SSH to spawn jobs
export GASNET_SPAWNFN=S
# Which ssh command should be used? ssh is the default.
export GASNET_SSH_CMD=ssh
# Disable X11 forwarding
export GASNET_SSH_OPTIONS=-x
# Specify which hosts to spawn on; SSH_SERVERS can be used equivalently
export GASNET_SSH_SERVERS="host1 host2 host3 ..."

where host1, host2, host3, … are the names of the workstations that will serve as your Chapel locales. In order to run your Chapel program on k locales, you must have k entries in the GASNET_SSH_SERVERS variable. To avoid typing in passwords for each node, you will probably want to use normal ssh-agent/ssh-add capabilities to support password-less ssh-ing.

Now running

./hello6-taskpar-dist -nl 2

should display 2 different hostnames that you specified in GASNET_SSH_SERVERS.

GASNet’s UDP conduit can be configured with many other options. Please refer to:

Using the UDP Conduit with Slurm

It is also possible to configure GASNet/UDP to launch jobs with Slurm using the following commands:

export GASNET_SPAWNFN=C
export GASNET_CSPAWN_CMD="srun -N%N %C"

Note that this configuration will not work for other conduits, as GASNET_SPAWNFN=C is specific to the UDP conduit.

See Using Slurm for more general information about using Chapel with Slurm and Using any SSH-based launcher with Slurm for another strategy.

Troubleshooting the UDP Conduit

I need to type a password when running my program

Configure your machines for password-less ssh. Try searching for “how to set up passwordless ssh”. You’ll know you have succeeded when you can ssh directly to the compute nodes without needing to type in a password each time.

I’m seeing login banners mixed with my program’s output

If you are using SSH to launch jobs, you might get a login banner printed out along with your program’s output. We have found the following setting useful to disable such printing:

export GASNET_SSH_OPTIONS="-o LogLevel=Error"

I’m seeing warnings from GASNet about using a higher-performance network

WARNING: Using GASNet's udp-conduit, which exists for portability convenience.
WARNING: Support was detected for native GASNet conduits: ibv
WARNING: You should *really* use the high-performance native GASNet conduit
WARNING: if communication performance is at all important in this program run.

Using a high-performance network, when available, is going to give much better performance with Chapel than the UDP conduit. However, in some cases (e.g. when comparing conduits) you might like to use the UDP conduit without these warnings. To turn them off, use:

export GASNET_QUIET=yes

I get xSocket errors when using a system with multiple IP addresses

*** FATAL ERROR: Got an xSocket while spawning slave process: connect()
failed while creating a connect socket (111:Connection refused)

Other error codes can arise, ex. (60:Operation timed out)

You need to set CHPL_RT_MASTERIP (or GASNET_MASTERIP), and possibly CHPL_RT_WORKERIP (or GASNET_WORKERIP). Please refer to:

For example, when simulating multiple locales by oversubscribing the local machine, use:

export CHPL_RT_MASTERIP=127.0.0.1
export CHPL_RT_WORKERIP=127.0.0.0  # may be optional