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[Thanks to Lee Higbie, ARSC Vector Specialist]
Whenever there is a system shutdown, whether from a hung processor or for scheduled maintenance, all the jobs running must be stopped.
# @ class = killable
While most jobs are checkpointable, some are not. If a job is non-checkpointable it will be terminated and rerun from the beginning after the downtime, unless the user launched the job with qsub's "-r n" option (see "man qsub").
This note concerns ways to make your X1 job checkpointable which will benefit you in two ways:
A well documented no-no for production X1 programs is using Cray's performance monitoring tool, pat_hwpc, which makes the job non-checkpointable. For this reason, even though pat_hwpc's usage overhead is negligible, it should not be used on large time-limit or production jobs. pat_hwpc should only be used for analysis, not for production.
A related impediment to checkpointing occurs when the executable is built using pat_build and an environment variable such as PAT_RT_HWPC or PAT_RT_RECORD_PE is set.
Some of the other job attributes that prevent checkpointing a job are listed below. These should all be avoided for long-running production programs:
For a complete list of features that are not checkpoint-safe, see "man cpr".
ARSC spring training starts at the end of March and will include three classes on the Cray X1 presented by James Schwarzmeier of Cray. All courses will be held in the ARSC classroom in the West Ridge Research Building room 009.
Tuesday March 29, 2005 Introduction to ARSC Resources: Kate Hedstrom 1 p.m. - 2 p.m. Wednesday March 30, 2005 Co-Array Fortran Programming: James Schwarzmeier, Cray, Inc. 9 a.m. - Noon Thursday March 31, 2005 X1 Optimization: James Schwarzmeier, Cray, Inc. 9 a.m. - Noon Friday April 1, 2005 X1 Macro and Micro Architecture: James Schwarzmeier, Cray, Inc. 9 a.m. - Noon Tuesday April 5, 2005 Introduction to UNIX: Lee Higbie 1 p.m. - 2 p.m. Tuesday April 26, 2005 Introduction to IDL: Sergei Maurits 1 p.m. - 2 p.m.
James Schwarzmeier will be available to users of the X1 for one on one consultation the afternoons of March 30 - April 1. Contact Tom Logan (tom.logan@arsc.edu / 907-450-8624) for more information on spring training opportunities or to schedule a meeting with James.
[Thanks to Wendy Palm of ARSC for the story idea]
The "pe-version" utility is included in the COS-3.6 module on klondike. This tool displays information for the currently loaded module environment, including package versions for C and Fortran compilers and more. This information can be particularly useful when documenting problems or when reporting problems to ARSC staff for further investigation.
E.g.: klondike 1% pe-version *** pe-version (20040303) run at: Mon Mar 21 11:17:27 AST 2005 *** Current system and OS information: UNICOS/mp klondike 2.5.26 02270947 crayx1 OS_LEVEL is set to: 2.5.26 *** Currently loaded Programming Environment components: # cftn package version is: 5.3.0.1 # CC package version is: 5.3.0.1 # craylibs package version is: 5.3.0.1 # libsci package version is: 5.3.0.0 # craytools package version is: 5.3.0.1 # mpt package version is: 2.4.0.2 # cal package version is: 1.2.0.3 # totalview package version is: 6.3.1.1 *** Compiler/Assembler/Loader/CrayPat Versions: Cray Fortran: Version 5.3.0.1 (u4031f93049i20076p53141a53007e53011x9317) Cray Fortran: Mon Mar 21, 2005 11:17:28 Cray Standard C: Version 5.3.0.1 Mon Mar 21, 2005 11:17:29 Cray NV Assembler Version 1.2.0.3 (s1203a52020e53010z1056) (Built Aug 18 2004) Cray X1 ld version 5.3 (l53030) -- Mon Mar 21 11:17:30 2005. CrayPat: Version 23.190 11/23/04 09:54:22 *** Current Trigger Versions: trigsnd: @(#)20/trigsnd.c 20.23 11/04/2003 10:20:32 trigexecd: @(#)20/trigexecd.c 20.18 11/04/2003 10:20:32 Currently Loaded Modulefiles: 1) modules 3) totalview 5) craytools 7) mpt 9) libsci 11) PrgEnv 13) motif 2) X11 4) cal 6) cftn 8) CC 10) craylibs 12) pbs 14) open
If you don't have the "open" module loaded you can run "pe-version" by specifying the full path to the executable.
E.g.:klondike 2% /opt/open/open/bin/pe-version
While "pe-version" doesn't show versions for all loaded packages it does include the modules used by most users.
SC05 (http://sc05.supercomputing.org/) will accept submissions for technical papers beginning Monday, March 28, 2005. The submission deadline is Monday, April 18, 2005.
Technical Papers Submission Website:
http://www.sc-submissions.org/
Submissions Open:
Monday, March 28th, 2005
Submissions Deadline:
Monday, April 18, 2005
Sample submission forms and instructions available at:
http://www.sc-submissions.org/
You can download the pdf or subscribe, at:
http://www.arcus.org/Witness_the_Arctic/Winter_04_05/Contents.html
The Arctic Climate Impact Assessment, released last November, is the subject of the lead article.
A:[[ Okay, I've settled on one favorite shell (ksh) which works on all six
[[ (yes, 6!) different flavors of Unix I use every week. Now my problem
[[ is the shell initialization files, .profile and .kshrc. I'll add a
[[ new alias on one system, a library path on another, a nifty prompt
[[ here, a function there... and now my dot files are different, and I
[[ can't remember which alias I've got here, which there, and it's
[[ making me crazy. Has anyone else ever had this problem? And solved
[[ it!?
#
# Many thanks to Wendy Palm:
#
I've run into similar problems before and he's right, this can be
annoying. Especially since you can't just copy the same .profile over
to every login you have. Operating systems are different, and
therefore your environment needs to be different too (you don't want
to be trying to load Cray modules on your SGI, do you?).
Therefore, what you need to do is to create your own environment file
with all the stuff you want the same on all the machines (like primary
and secondary prompt, aliases, general functions etc.), and source it
in the various login dotfiles, leaving all the system-specific things
in the login dotfiles.
For instance, I'd call this something like ".personal":
.personal
#------------
PS1=`hostname`"> "
# whatever functions and aliases you set up
#------------
Then, in the .profile on each homedir on each system, put in:
. $HOME/.personal
Then, if you want to change/add a function, you'd make the change once
and just copy the file to all the systems you have accounts on.
Not all systems pay attention to the .kshrc file (Crays in particular),
so I tend to not use it at all.
Hope this helps.
#
# Here's a variation from the editor.
#
I maintain a file called "ALL.profile" on my desktop system. It contains
all my general purpose aliases, functions, etc. and then, in a series of
korn shell "if" blocks, all the settings for specific systems.
If I need to change something for the IBM, for example, I edit
ALL.profile and then run a script which pushes the new ALL.profile out
to all the other systems as ~/.profile. The advantage is that I have
one, and only one, profile file to worry about.
Here's a heavily edited sample:
#--------------------------------------------------------------------
# ALL.profile
#--------------------------------------------------------------------
export OSNAME=$(uname)
alias \
mo='more ' \
mor='more ' \
mroe='more '
#--------------------------------------------------------------------
# IRIX
#--------------------------------------------------------------------
if [[ IRIX = ${OSNAME} ]]; then
# Set the interrupt character to Ctrl-C and do clean backspacing.
if [ -t 0 ]
then
stty intr '^C' echoe
fi
fi
#--------------------------------------------------------------------
# Mac OSX
#--------------------------------------------------------------------
if [[ Darwin = ${OSNAME} ]]; then
alias vim='open -a ~/Applications/vim/Vim.app '
fi
#
# ... BONUS ANSWER ...
#
# Here's another solution to the web page retrieval question.
# Thanks to Dale Clark:
Lacking curl, lynx, or wget, one can always use telnet to fetch a
page, in a minimalist manner. Example:
loon> telnet www.arsc.edu 80
Trying 199.165.84.118...
Connected to www.arsc.edu (199.165.84.118).
Escape character is '^]'.
GET /misc/staff.html HTTP/1.0
... # Document text omitted.
Note that two carriage returns must follow the GET command.
Q: I often find myself comparing versions of source files trying to
figure out what changed between the versions. Good old-fashioned
diff works just fine, but there's got to be a more modern solution.
Do you know of any text editors or other tools that have file
comparison functionality built in?
[[ Answers, Questions, and Tips Graciously Accepted ]]
Contact:
Thomas J. Baring ARSC Web Specialist ph: 907-450-8619 Donald Bahls ARSC User Consultant ph: 907-450-8674 Arctic Region Supercomputing Center University of Alaska Fairbanks PO Box 756020 Fairbanks AK 99775-6020
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