[gmx-developers] g_hbond OpenMP parallelization only for ACF

[Bin Liu]

Hi Everyone,

Thank Erik and David for your replies. After some playing with g_hbond, I
found some interesting phenomena which are both interesting and annoying.

First, it seems the -don flag corrupts the g_hbond. When I turned on this
flag, g_hbond would either show "Segmentation fault" immediately, or run
single_threaded (judged from system monitor) and very slowly for quite a
while, and then show "Segmentation fault". With this flag, g_hbond never
finished its job gracefully. I tested it using both GROMACS 4.6.5 (compiled
by gcc 4.6 and 4.7) and GROMACS 5.0 .

Second, if -don turned off, apparently the stage of grid search runs with
OpenMP enabled, and g_hbond can function properly. However, the system
monitor showed the load was quite evenly distributed on all the 8 logical
cores (i7-3770K), but the CPU utilizations for all the logical cores were
around 50%. At first, I thought maybe it was relevant to Hyperthreading of
3770K and the physical cores were kept busy all the time. However my
experiment on another machine equipped with an ancient CPU (Core2 quad
6600, no HT) showed exactly the same phenomenon. Actually the speed of
g_hbond in these two cases were still satisfactory. I just want to present
some useful information that might indicate some performance issue with the
OpenMP implementation of g_hbond and arouse the attention of the
developer(s) to investigate it.

I attached the compilation information for GROMACS 4.6.5 on my 3770K
machine.

Regards,

Bin

Gromacs version:    VERSION 4.6.5
Precision:          single
Memory model:       64 bit
MPI library:        thread_mpi
OpenMP support:     enabled
GPU support:        enabled
invsqrt routine:    gmx_software_invsqrt(x)
CPU acceleration:   AVX_256
FFT library:        fftw-3.3.3-sse2
Large file support: enabled
RDTSCP usage:       enabled
Built on:           Sat Dec 21 12:37:38 EST 2013
Built by:           main at MainPC [CMAKE]
Build OS/arch:      Linux 3.5.0-41-generic x86_64
Build CPU vendor:   GenuineIntel
Build CPU brand:    Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-3770K CPU @ 3.50GHz
Build CPU family:   6   Model: 58   Stepping: 9
Build CPU features: aes apic avx clfsh cmov cx8 cx16 f16c htt lahf_lm mmx
msr nonstop_tsc pcid pclmuldq pdcm popcnt pse rdrnd rdtscp sse2 sse3 sse4.1
sse4.2 ssse3 tdt
C compiler:         /usr/bin/gcc GNU gcc (Ubuntu/Linaro
4.6.4-1ubuntu1~12.04) 4.6.4
C compiler flags:   -mavx    -Wextra -Wno-missing-field-initializers
-Wno-sign-compare -Wall -Wno-unused -Wunused-value   -fomit-frame-pointer
-funroll-all-loops -fexcess-precision=fast  -O3 -DNDEBUG
C++ compiler:       /usr/bin/c++ GNU c++ (Ubuntu/Linaro
4.6.4-1ubuntu1~12.04) 4.6.4
C++ compiler flags: -mavx   -Wextra -Wno-missing-field-initializers
-Wno-sign-compare -Wall -Wno-unused -Wunused-value   -fomit-frame-pointer
-funroll-all-loops -fexcess-precision=fast  -O3 -DNDEBUG
CUDA compiler:      /usr/local/cuda-5.0/bin/nvcc nvcc: NVIDIA (R) Cuda
compiler driver;Copyright (c) 2005-2012 NVIDIA Corporation;Built on
Fri_Sep_21_17:28:58_PDT_2012;Cuda compilation tools, release 5.0, V0.2.1221
CUDA compiler
flags:-gencode;arch=compute_20,code=sm_20;-gencode;arch=compute_20,code=sm_21;-gencode;arch=compute_30,code=sm_30;-gencode;arch=compute_35,code=sm_35;-gencode;arch=compute_35,code=compute_35;-use_fast_math;-ccbin=/usr/bin/gcc;-Xcompiler;-fPIC
;
-mavx;-Wextra;-Wno-missing-field-initializers;-Wno-sign-compare;-Wall;-Wno-unused;-Wunused-value;-fomit-frame-pointer;-funroll-all-loops;-fexcess-precision=fast;-O3;-DNDEBUG
CUDA driver:        5.50
CUDA runtime:       5.0
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