Symmetric Multiprocessors (SMPs)


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On many of the shared-memory implementations (device ch_shmem, mpich reserves some shared memory in which messages are transferred back and forth. By default, mpich reserves roughly four CHECK MBytes of shared memory. You can change this with the environment variable MPI_GLOBMEMSIZE. For example, to make it 8 MB, enter

    setenv MPI_GLOBMEMSIZE 8388608 

Large messages are transfered in pieces, so MPI_GLOBMEMSIZE does not limit the maximum message size but increasing it may improve performance.

By default, MPICH limits the number of processes for the ch_shmem device to 32, unless it determines at configure time that the machine has more processors. You can override this limit by setting the environment variable PROCESSOR_COUNT to the maximum number of processes that you will want to run, and then reconfigure and remake mpich.



Up: Special features of different systems Next: Sample MPI programs Previous: Intel Paragon