[Wien] LAPW1 crash on cycle 4

Laurence Marks L-marks at northwestern.edu
Mon May 28 18:23:36 CEST 2012


At least with top you can look at the cpu column. If a process is
using ~100% of the cpu (with top, hopefully htop is similar) then it
is using 1 thread; one using 8 shows around 800%.

Do you have ganglia installed? If you do then that shows swap nicely,
and several other things. If not, try "man -k swap", probably not
useful. A colleague swears by nmon which in principle can show you
everything useful,  but I've never used it. It might be the fastest
diagnostic, and probably easy to install. (If you use it and it is
useful let me and others know.)

N.B., I assume there was nothing useful in the system logs.

On Mon, May 28, 2012 at 9:55 AM, Marcelo Barbosa
<marcelo.b.barbosa at gmail.com> wrote:
> Thank you very much for your answer.
>
> I used htop to check the system while running and the swap (which says
> having 2Gb available) only uses ~40Mb during the calculation. The memory
> shows ~2Gb being used, so, is there any chance of being a swapping process
> going in & out of memory and htop not showing it?
>
> I'm using mkl installed with the Intel compiler version 11.1. How can i
> check if each lapw1 is trying to use 8 threads?
> I'm only using half of the available threads, so i thought i would be
> safe...
>
> Cheers,
> Marcelo Barbosa
>
> On May 14, 2012, at 2:19 PM, Laurence Marks wrote:
>
> I suspect that nobody will be able to be very specific, beyond the obvious
> statement that you are overloading the computer. While you may only be using
> 2Gb for the Wien2k jobs, the OS needs some so you may well be running out of
> memory. Did you check the swap space useage, and look to see if the
> processes are swapping in & out of memory?
>
> Also, if you are using mkl then each lapw1 task may be trying to use 8
> threads. Depending upon how new the computer is hyperthreading may or may
> not be effecient.
>
> I suggest looking in the system logs, they might have some information, and
> use less tasks in parallel, e.g. 2. (And/or get more memory.)
>
> On Mon, May 14, 2012 at 6:46 AM, Marcelo Barbosa
> <marcelo.b.barbosa at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> Hello to you all
>>
>> I'm trying to run a structure made of 16 atoms using 100 k-points
>> (resulting in 12 k-points in the irreducible brillouin zone) on a machine
>> with 4 cores with hyper-threaring, thus 8 threads available, and 4Gb of RAM.
>>
>> I tried to run "run_lapw -p -fc 1 -NI" using a .machines file:
>>
>> 1:localhost
>> 1:localhost
>> 1:localhost
>> 1:localhost
>> granularity:1
>> extrafine:1
>>
>> accessing only four threads but at LAPW1 in the cycle 4 i get this on the
>> *.dayfile
>>
>>
>>    cycle 4     (Fri May 11 20:13:21 WEST 2012)         (37/96 to go)
>>
>> >   lapw0 -p    (20:13:21) starting parallel lapw0 at Fri May 11 20:13:21
>> > WEST 2012
>> -------- .machine0 : processors
>> running lapw0 in single mode
>> 37.166u 0.361s 0:37.53 99.9%    0+0k 0+11944io 0pf+0w
>> :FORCE convergence: 0 1 0 XCO 3.91 YCO 23.9 YCO 2.38 YCO 47.7 ZCO 45.0 ZCO
>> 24.7 YCO 24.7 ZCO 50.6 YCO 4.12 YCO 10.1 ZCO 30.2 ZCO 3.51 YCO 3.27 YCO 5.20
>> ZCO 8.33 ZCO
>> >   lapw1  -c -p        (20:14:00) starting parallel lapw1 at Fri May 11
>> > 20:14:00 WEST 2012
>> ->  starting parallel LAPW1 jobs at Fri May 11 20:14:00 WEST 2012
>> running LAPW1 in parallel mode (using .machines)
>> 4 number_of_parallel_jobs
>> [1] 26970
>> [2] 27037
>> [3] 27103
>> [4] 27169
>> [1]    Done                          ( ( $remote $machine[$p] "cd $PWD;$t
>> $exe ${def}_$loop.def ;fixerror_lapw ${def}_$loop"; rm -f
>> .lock_$lockfile[$p] ) >& .stdout1_$loop; if ( -f .stdout1_$loop )
>> bashtime2csh.pl_lapw .stdout1_$loop > .temp1_$loop; grep \% .temp1_$loop >>
>> .time1_$loop; grep -v \% .temp1_$loop | perl -e "print stderr <STDIN>" )
>>
>>
>>
>> And the computer completely crashes and i have to reboot it.
>>
>> Do you have any idea of what might be happening?
>> I thought it could be the lack of RAM, but until the end of the second
>> cycle i was monitoring it with htop and it never got to use more that 2Gb of
>> RAM, so i left it thinking there would be no problem.
>> I used tmux to run this in the background, as i access the machine throw
>> ssh.
>>
>> Cheers,
>> Marcelo Barbosa
>>
>>
>>
>>
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>> Wien at zeus.theochem.tuwien.ac.at
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>
>
>
>
> --
> Professor Laurence Marks
> Department of Materials Science and Engineering
> Northwestern University
> www.numis.northwestern.edu 1-847-491-3996
> "Research is to see what everybody else has seen, and to think what nobody
> else has thought"
> Albert Szent-Gyorgi
> _______________________________________________
> Wien mailing list
> Wien at zeus.theochem.tuwien.ac.at
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>
>



-- 
Professor Laurence Marks
Department of Materials Science and Engineering
Northwestern University
www.numis.northwestern.edu 1-847-491-3996
"Research is to see what everybody else has seen, and to think what
nobody else has thought"
Albert Szent-Gyorgi


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