Two openmp ordered blocks with no resulting parallelization - fortran

I am writing a Fortran program that needs to have reproducible results (for publication). My understanding of the following code is that it should be reproducible.
program main
implicit none
real(8) :: ybest,xbest,x,y
integer :: i
ybest = huge(0d0)
!$omp parallel do ordered private(x,y) shared(ybest,xbest) schedule(static,1)
do i = 1,10
!$omp ordered
!$omp critical
call random_number(x)
!$omp end critical
!$omp end ordered
! Do a lot of work
call sleep(1)
y = -1d0
!$omp ordered
!$omp critical
if (y<ybest) then
ybest = y
xbest = x
end if
!$omp end critical
!$omp end ordered
end do
!$omp end parallel do
end program
In my case, there is a function in place of "sleep" that takes long time to compute, and I want it done in parallel. According to OpenMP standards, should sleep in this example execute in parallel? I thought it should be (based on this How does the omp ordered clause work?), but with gfortran 5.2.0 (mac) and gfortran 5.1.0 (linux) it is not executing in parallel (at least, there is no speedup from it). The timing results are below.
Also, my guess is the critical statements are not necessary, but I wasn't completely sure.
Thanks.
-Edit-
In response to Vladmir's comments, I added a full working program with timing results.
#!/bin/bash
mpif90 main.f90
time ./a.out
mpif90 main.f90 -fopenmp
time ./a.out
The code runs as
real 0m10.047s
user 0m0.003s
sys 0m0.003s
real 0m10.037s
user 0m0.003s
sys 0m0.004s
BUT, if you comment out the ordered blocks, it runs with the following times:
real 0m10.044s
user 0m0.002s
sys 0m0.003s
real 0m3.021s
user 0m0.002s
sys 0m0.004s
Edit -
In response to innoSPG, here are the results for a non-trivial function in place of sleep:
real(8) function f(x)
implicit none
real(8), intent(in) :: x
! local
real(8) :: tmp
integer :: i
tmp = 0d0
do i = 1,10000000
tmp = tmp + cos(sin(x))/real(i,8)
end do
f = tmp
end function
real 0m2.229s --- no openmp
real 0m2.251s --- with openmp and ordered
real 0m0.773s --- with openmp but ordered commented out

This program is non-conforming to the OpenMP standard. Specifically, the problem is that you have more than one ordered region and every iteration of your loop will execute both of them. The OpenMP 4.0 standard has this to say (2.12.8, Restrictions, line 16, p 139):
During execution of an iteration of a loop or a loop nest within a loop region, a thread must not execute more than one ordered region that binds to the same loop
region.
If you have more than one ordered region, you must have conditional code paths such that only one of them can be executed for any loop iteration.
It is also worth noting the position of your ordered region seems to have performance implications. Testing with gfortran 5.2, it appears everything after the ordered region is executed in order for each loop iteration, so having the ordered block at the beginning of the loop leads to serial performance while having the ordered block at the end of the loop does not have this implication as the code before the block is parallelized. Testing with ifort 15 is not as dramatic but I would still recommend structuring your code so your ordered block occurs after any code than needs parallelization in a loop iteration rather than before.

Related

Poor scaling and a segmentation fault in a Fortran OpenMP code

I'm having some trouble when executing a program with a parallel do. Here is a test code.
module test
use, intrinsic :: iso_fortran_env, only: dp => real64
implicit none
contains
subroutine Addition(x,y,s)
real(dp),intent(in) :: x,y
real(dp), intent(out) :: s
s = x+y
end subroutine Addition
function linspace(length,xi,xf) result (vec)
! function to create an equally spaced vector given a begin and end point
real(dp),intent(in) :: xi,xf
integer, intent(in) :: length
real(dp),dimension(1:length) :: vec
integer ::i
real(dp) :: increment
increment = (xf-xi)/(real(length)-1)
vec(1) = xi
do i = 2,length
vec(i) = vec(i-1) + increment
end do
end function linspace
end module test
program paralleltest
use, intrinsic :: iso_fortran_env, only: dp => real64
use test
use :: omp_lib
implicit none
integer, parameter :: length = 1000
real(dp),dimension(length) :: x,y
real(dp) :: s
integer:: i,j
integer :: num_threads = 8
real(dp),dimension(length,length) :: SMatrix
x = linspace(length,.0d0,1.0d0)
y = linspace(length,2.0d0,3.0d0)
!$ call omp_set_num_threads(num_threads)
!$OMP PARALLEL DO
do i=1,size(x)
do j = 1,size(y)
call Addition(x(i),y(j),s)
SMatrix(i,j) = s
end do
end do
!$OMP END PARALLEL DO
open(unit=1,file ='Add6.dat')
do i= 1,size(x)
do j= 1,size(y)
write(1,*) x(i),";",y(j),";",SMatrix(i,j)
end do
end do
close(unit=1)
end program paralleltest
I'm running the program in the following waygfortran-8 -fopenmp paralleltest.f03 -o pt.out -mcmodel=medium and then export OMP_NUM_THREADS=8
This simple code brings me at least two big questions on parallel do. The first is that if I run with length = 1100 or greater, I have Segmentation fault (core dump) error message but with smaller values it runs with no problem. The second is about the time it takes. When I run it with length = 1000 (run with time ./pt.out) the time it takes is 1,732s but if I run it in a sequential way (without calling the -fopenmplibrary and with taskset -c 4 time./pt.out ) it takes 1,714s. I guess the difference between both ways arise in a longer and more complex code where parallel is more usefull. In fact when I tried it with more complex calculations running in parallel with eight threads, time was reduced at half that it took in sequential but not an eighth as I expected. In view of this my questions are, is any optimization available always or is it code dependent? and second, is there a friendly way to control which thread runs which iteration? That is the first running the first length/8 iteration, and so on, like performing several taskset 's with different code where in each is the iteration that I want.
As I commented, the Segmentation fault has been treated elsewhere Why Segmentation fault is happening in this openmp code?, I would use an allocatable array, but you can also set the stacksize using ulimit -s.
Regarding the time, almost all of the runtime is spent in writing the array to the external file.
But even if you remove that and you measure the time only spent in the parallel section using omp_get_wtime() and increase the problem size, it still does not scale too well. This because there is very little computation for the CPU to do and a lot of array writing to memory (accessing main memory is slow - cache misses).
As Jean-Claude Arbaut pointed out, your loop order is wrong and makes accessing the memory even slower. Some compilers can change that for you with higher optimization levels (-O2 or -O3), but only some of them.
And even worse, as Jim Cownie pointed out, you have a race condition. Multiple threads try to use the same s for both reading and writing and the program is invalid. You need to make s private using private(s).
With the above fixes I get a roughly two times faster parallel section with four cores and four threads. Don't try to use hyper-threading, it slows the program down.
If you give the CPU more computational work to do, like s = Bessel_J0(x)/Bessel_J1(y) it scales pretty well for me, almost four times faster with four threads, and hyper threading does speed it up a little bit.
Finally, I suggest just removing the manual setting of the number of threads, it is a pain for testing. If you remove that, you can use OMP_NUM_THREADS=4 ./a.out easily.

Bad performance of parallel subroutine

I was trying to parallelize the following code; however, when it was executed on the main program, there didn't seem to be significant speed-up. I tested the same subroutine on another program, and it took even longer time to run than the serial code.
SUBROUTINE rotate(r,qt,n,np,i,a,b)
IMPLICIT NONE
INTEGER n,np,i
DOUBLE PRECISION a,b,r(np,np),qt(np,np)
INTEGER j
DOUBLE PRECISION c,fact,s,w,y
if(a.eq.0.d0)then
c=0.d0
s=sign(1.d0,b)
else if(abs(a).gt.abs(b))then
fact=b/a
c=sign(1.d0/sqrt(1.d0+fact**2),a)
s=fact*c
else
fact=a/b
s=sign(1.d0/sqrt(1.d0+fact**2),b)
c=fact*s
endif
!$omp parallel shared(i,n,c,s,r,qt) private(y,w,j)
!$omp do schedule(static,2)
do 11 j=i,n
y=r(i,j)
w=r(i+1,j)
r(i,j)=c*y-s*w
r(i+1,j)=s*y+c*w
11 continue
!$omp do schedule(static,2)
do 12 j=1,n
y=qt(i,j)
w=qt(i+1,j)
qt(i,j)=c*y-s*w
qt(i+1,j)=s*y+c*w
12 continue
!$omp end parallel
return
END
C (C) Copr. 1986-92 Numerical Recipes Software Vs94z&):9+X%1j49#:`*.
However when I used the built-in function in Linux to measure the time, i got:
real 0m12.160s
user 4m49.894s
sys 0m0.880s
which is ridiculous compared to the time of the serial code:
real 0m2.078s
user 0m2.068s
sys 0m0.000s
So you have something like
do i=1,n
do j=1,n
do k=1,n
call rotate()
end do
end do
end do
for n = 100 and you are parallelizing two simple loops inside rotate.
That is hopeless. If you want decent performance, you must parallelize the outermost loop that is possible.
There is simply not enough work inside the loops inside rotate and it is called too many times. You call it 1000000 times so the threads must be synchronised or re-launched 2000000 times. That takes all of your run time. All the run time increase you see is this synchronization.

programming issue with openmp

I am having issues with openmp, described as follows:
I have the serial code like this
subroutine ...
...
do i=1,N
....
end do
end subroutine ...
and the openmp code is
subroutine ...
use omp_lib
...
call omp_set_num_threads(omp_get_num_procs())
!$omp parallel do
do i=1,N
....
end do
!$omp end parallel do
end subroutine ...
No issues with compiling, however when I run the program, there are two major issues compared to the result of serial code:
The program is running even slower than the serial code (which supposedly do matrix multiplications (matmul) in the do-loop
The numerical accuracy seems to have dropped compared to the serial code (I have a check for it)
Any ideas what might be going on?
Thanks,
Xiaoyu
In case of an parallelization using OpenMP, you will need to specify the number of threads your program is to use. You can do so by using the environment variable OMP_NUM_THREADS, e.g. calling your program by means of
OMP_NUM_THREADS=5 ./myprogram
to execute it using 5 threads.
Alternatively, you may set the number of threads at runtime omp_set_num_threads (documentation).
Side Notes
Don't forget to set private variables, if there are any within the loop!
Example:
!$omp parallel do private(prelimRes)
do i = 1, N
prelimRes = myFunction(i)
res(i) = prelimRes + someValue
end do
!$omp end parallel do
Note how the variable prelimRes is declared private so that every thread has its own workspace.
Depending on what you actually do within the loop (i.e. use OpenBLAS), your results may indeed vary (variations should be smaller than 1e-8 with regard to double precision variables) due to the differing, parellel processing.
If you are unsure about what is happening, you should check the CPU load using htop or a similar program while your program is running.
Addendum: Setting the number of threads to automatically match the number of CPUs
If you would like to use the maximum number of useful threads, e.g. use as many threads as there are CPUs, you can do so by using (just like you stated in your question):
subroutine ...
use omp_lib
...
call omp_set_num_threads(omp_get_num_procs())
!$omp parallel do
do i=1,N
....
end do
!$omp end do
!$omp end parallel
end subroutine ...

Threads summing a variable giving wrong answer in OpenMP

To practice parallelizing the do loop, I am doing the following integral in Fortran
$\integral{0}{1} \frac{4}{1+x^{2}} = \pi$
The following is the code that I implemented:
program mpintegrate
integer i,nmax,nthreads,OMP_GET_NUM_THREADS
real xn,dx,value
real X(100000)
nthreads = 4
nmax = 100000
xn = 0.0
dx = 1.0/nmax
value = 0.0
do i=1,nmax
X(i) = xn
xn = xn + dx
enddo
call OMP_SET_NUM_THREADS(nthreads)
!$OMP Parallel
!$OMP Do Schedule(Static) Private(i,X)
do i=1,nmax
value = value + dx*(4.0/(1+X(i)*X(i)))
enddo
!$OMP End DO NoWait
!$OMP End Parallel
print *, value
end
I have no problems compiling the program
gfortran -fopenmp -o mpintegrate mpintegrate.f
The problem is when I execute the program. When I run the program as is, I get values ranging from (1,4). However, when I uncomment the print statement withing the omp do loop, the final value is around what it should be, pi.
Why is the answer in value incorrect?
One problem here is that X needs to not be private (and which needs to be specified on the parallel line, not the do line); everyone needs to see it, and there's no point in having separate copies for each thread. Worse, the results you get from accessing the private copy here is undefined, as that private variable hasn't been initialized once you get into the private region. You could use firstprivate rather than private, which initializes it for you with what was there before the parallel region, but easiest/best here is just shared.
There's also not much point in having the end do be no wait, as the end parallel has to wait for everyone to be done anyway.
However, that being said, you still have a pretty major (and classic) correctness problem. What's happening here is clearer if you're a little more explicit in the loop (dropping the schedule for clarity since the issue doesn't depend on the schedule chosen):
!$OMP Parallel do Private(i) Default(none) Shared(value,X,dx,nmax)
do i=1,nmax
value = value + dx*(4.0/(1+X(i)*X(i)))
enddo
!$OMP End Parallel Do
print *, value
Running this repeatedly gives different values:
$ ./foo
1.6643878
$ ./foo
1.5004054
$ ./foo
1.2746993
The problem is that all of the threads are writing to the same shared variable value. This is wrong - everyone is writing at once and the result is gibberish, as a thread can calculate it's own contribution, get ready to add it to value, and just as it's about to, another thread can do its writing to value, which then gets promptly clobbered. Concurrent writes to the same shared variable is a classic race condition, a standard family of bugs that happen particularly often in shared-memory programming like with OpenMP.
In addition to being wrong, it's slow. A number of threads contending for the same few bytes of memory - memory close enough together to fall in the same cache line - can be very slow because of contention in the memory system. Even if they aren't exactly the same variable (as they are in this case), this memory contention - False Sharing in the case that they only happen to be neighbouring variables - can significantly slow things down. Taking out the explicit thread-number setting, and using environment variables:
$ export OMP_NUM_THREADS=1
$ time ./foo
3.1407621
real 0m0.003s
user 0m0.001s
sys 0m0.001s
$ export OMP_NUM_THREADS=2
$ time ./foo
3.1224852
real 0m0.007s
user 0m0.012s
sys 0m0.000s
$ export OMP_NUM_THREADS=8
$ time ./foo
1.1651508
real 0m0.008s
user 0m0.042s
sys 0m0.000s
So things get almost 3 times slower (and increasingly wronger) running with more threads.
So what can we do to fix this? One thing we could to is make sure that everyone's additions aren't overwriting each other, with the atomic directive:
!$OMP Parallel do Schedule(Static) Private(i) Default(none) Shared(X,dx, value, nmax)
do i=1,nmax
!$OMP atomic
value = value + dx*(4.0/(1+X(i)*X(i)))
enddo
!$OMP end parallel do
which solves the correctness problem:
$ export OMP_NUM_THREADS=8
$ ./foo
3.1407621
but does nothing for the speed problem:
$ export OMP_NUM_THREADS=1
$ time ./foo
3.1407621
real 0m0.004s
user 0m0.001s
sys 0m0.002s
$ export OMP_NUM_THREADS=2
$ time ./foo
3.1407738
real 0m0.014s
user 0m0.023s
sys 0m0.001s
(Note you get slightly different answers with different numbers of threads. This is due to the final sum being calculated in a different order than in the serial case. With single precision reals, differences showing up in the 7th digit due to different ordering of operations is hard to avoid, and here we're doing 100,000 operations.)
So what else could we do? One approach is for everyone to keep track of their own partial sums, and then sum them all together when we're done:
!...
integer, parameter :: nthreads = 4
integer, parameter :: space=8
integer :: threadno
real, dimension(nthreads*space) :: partials
!...
partials=0
!...
!$OMP Parallel Private(value,i,threadno) Default(none) Shared(X,dx, partials)
value = 0
threadno = omp_get_thread_num()
!$OMP DO
do i=1,nmax
value = value + dx*(4.0/(1+X(i)*X(i)))
enddo
!$OMP END DO
partials((threadno+1)*space) = value
!$OMP end parallel
value = sum(partials)
print *, value
end
This works - we get the right answer, and if you play with the number of threads, you'll find it's pretty zippy - we've spaced out the entries in the partial sums array to avoid false sharing (and it is false, this time, as everyone is writing to a different entry in the array - no overwriting).
Still, this is a silly amount of work just to get a sum correct across threads! There's a simpler way to do this - OpenMP has a reduction construct to do this automatically (and more efficiently than this handmade version above:)
!$OMP Parallel do reduction(+:value) Private(i) Default(none) Shared(X,dx)
do i=1,nmax
value = value + dx*(4.0/(1+X(i)*X(i)))
enddo
!$OMP end parallel do
print *, value
and now the program works correctly, is fast, and the code is fairly simple. The final code, in more modern Fortran, looks something like this:
program mpintegrate
use omp_lib
integer, parameter :: nmax = 100000
real :: xn,dx,value
real :: X(nmax)
integer :: i
integer, parameter :: nthreads = 4
xn = 0.0
dx = 1.0/nmax
value = 0.0
partials=0
do i=1,nmax
X(i) = xn
xn = xn + dx
enddo
call omp_set_num_threads(nthreads)
!$OMP Parallel do reduction(+:value) Private(i) Default(none) Shared(X,dx)
do i=1,nmax
value = value + dx*(4.0/(1+X(i)*X(i)))
enddo
!$OMP end parallel do
print *, value
end

Thread issues when writing to files with OpenMP in Fortran

The number of files that are getting written is always less than the number of threads. Logically for me, when I can have 4 threads and the CPU is working at 400%, I was expecting the number of files to be 4 (one each corresponding to every single thread). I don't know if there is a problem with my code or this is how it is supposed to work. The code is as follows:
!!!!!!!! module
module common
use iso_fortran_env
implicit none
integer,parameter:: dp=real64
real(dp):: aa,bb
contains
subroutine evolve(y,yevl)
implicit none
integer(dp),parameter:: id=2
real(dp),intent(in):: y(id)
real(dp),intent(out):: yevl(id)
yevl(1)=y(2)+1.d0-aa*y(1)**2
yevl(2)=bb*y(1)
end subroutine evolve
end module common
use common
implicit none
integer(dp):: iii,iter,i
integer(dp),parameter:: id=2
real(dp),allocatable:: y(:),yt(:)
integer(dp):: OMP_GET_THREAD_NUM, IXD
allocate(y(id)); allocate(yt(id)); y=0.d0; yt=0.d0; bb=0.3d0
!$OMP PARALLEL PRIVATE(iii,iter,y,i,yt) SHARED(bb)
IXD=OMP_GET_THREAD_NUM()
!$OMP DO
do iii=1,20000; print*,iii !! EXPECTED THREADS TO BE OF 5000 ITERATIONS EACH
aa=1.d0+dfloat(iii-1)*0.4d0/80000.d0
loop1: do iter=1,10 !! THE INITIAL CONDITION LOOP
call random_number(y)!! RANDOM INITIALIZATION OF THE VARIABLE
loop2: do i=1,70000 !! ITERATION OF THE SYSTEM
call evolve(y,yt)
y=yt
enddo loop2 !! END OF SYSTEM ITERATION
write(IXD+1,*)aa,yt !!! WRITING FILE CORRESPONDING TO EACH THREAD
enddo loop1 !!INITIAL CONDITION ITERATION DONE
enddo
!$OMP ENDDO
!$OMP END PARALLEL
end
Is this behavior resulting from some race issue in the code? The code compiles and executes just fine without any warnings or errors with ifort version 13.1.0 on ubuntu. Thanks a bunch for any comments or suggestions.
The variable IXD should be explicitely declared as private to make sure every thread has an own copy of it. Changing the line(s)
!$OMP PARALLEL PRIVATE(iii,iter,y,i,yt) SHARED(bb)
IXD=OMP_GET_THREAD_NUM()
to
!$OMP PARALLEL PRIVATE(iii,iter,y,i,yt,ixd) SHARED(bb)
IXD=OMP_GET_THREAD_NUM()
solves the problem.