Parallelization Control and Configuration

Requirements

 CASA can be run in parallel on a cluster of computer nodes or on a single multi-core computer. In the multi-node case, the following requirements are necessary for all nodes to be included in the cluster. Users with access to a cluster will not need to do these settings, but it is still useful to be aware of the configuration:

  • Password-less ssh access from the client (user) machine into all the nodes to be included in the cluster.

    NOTE: This is not necessary when using only localhost, i.e. if the cluster is deployed only on the machine where CASA is running.

  • All the input files must be located in a shared file-system, accessible from all the nodes comprising the cluster, and mounted in the same path of the file-system.
  • Mirrored CASA installation with regards to the CASA installation in the client (user) machine, so that the following environmental variables are pointing to valid installations: PATH, LD_LIBRARY_PATH, IPYTHONDIR, CASAPATH, CASAARCH, PYTHONHOME, __CASAPY_PYTHONDIR, PGPLOT_DEV, PGPLOT_DIR, PGPLOT_FONT. This is usually achieved by having the CASA installation on a shared file-system.

 

Configuration and Start-Up

 The main library used in CASA (4.4+) to achieve parallelization is the Message Passing Interface (MPI) and in particular the OpenMPI implementation. MPI is already included in the CASA distribution so that users do not need to install it. The CASA distribution comes with a wrapper of the MPI executor, which is called mpicasa. This wrapper does several settings behind the scenes in order to properly configure the environment to run CASA in parallel.

The collection of CASA processes which will run the jobs from parallelized tasks, is set up via mpicasa. The simplest example is to run CASA in parallel on the localhost using the available cores in the machine. A typical example would be to run CASA on a desktop with 16 cores such as the following example:

mpicasa -n 16 path_to_casa/casa

Where:

  1. mpicasa: Wrapper around mpirun, which can be found in the casa installation directory. Example: /home/user/casa-release-4.5.0-el6/bin
  2. -n : MPI option to get the number of processes to run.
  3. 16: The number of cores to be used in the localhost machine.

    NOTE: MPI uses one process as the MPI Client, which is where the user will see messages printed in the terminal or in the logger. The other processes are used for the parallel work and are called MPI Servers. Because of this, usually we give number_of_processes + 1.

  4. casa: Full path to the CASA executable, casa.
  5. casa_options: CASA options such as: -c, –nogui, –log2term, etc.

It is also possible to use other nodes, which can form a “cluster”. Following the requirements given above, replace the “-n” option of mpicasa with a “-hostfile host_file”, as shown below:

mpicasa -hostfile path_to_casa/casa

Where:

  1. host_file: It is a text file containing the name of the nodes forming the cluster and the number of cores to use in each one of the nodes.

Example:

orion slots=5
antares slots=4
sirius slots=4

The above configuration file will set up a cluster comprised of three nodes (orion, antares and sirius), deploying the cores per node as follows: At host “orion” up to 5 cores will be deployed (including the MPI Client). If the processing requires more cores, it will take them from “antares” and once all the 4 engines in “antares” are used, it will use up to 4 cores in “sirius”.

 

To run CASA in interactive mode (without the "-c" option) the user needs to first login to the desired computer node with X11 forwarding. This is achieved with the command    ssh -XY , where is the hostname of the computer where he/she wants to run CASA.   

mpicasa -n path_to_casa/casa

This will open an xterm window for the interactive work. To get help do:

mpicasa --help