Optimising for Parallel Processing

Overview

Teaching: 15 min
Exercises: 0 min

Questions

How can I run several tasks from a single Slurm job.

Objectives

Understand how to use GNU Parallel to run multiple programs from one job

Optimising for Parallel Processing

Running a job on multiple cores

By default most programs will only run one job per node, but all Supercomputing Wales nodes have multiple CPU cores and are capable of running multiple processes at once without (much) loss of performance.

A crude way to achieve this is to have our job submission script just run multiple processes and background each one with the & operator.

#!/bin/bash --login
###
# set the job name and output files
#SBATCH --job-name=test
#SBATCH --output=test.out.%J
#SBATCH --error=test.err.%J
# set a short time limit so the job will start quickly
#SBATCH --time=0-00:01
# specify the number of CPU cores we will need
#SBATCH --ntasks=3
# ensure that tasks run on the same node
#SBATCH --nodes=1
# specify our current project
# replace XXXX with the code provided by your instructor
#SBATCH --account=scwXXXX
# specify the reservation we have for the training workshop
# remove this for your own work
# replace XXXX and YY with the code provided by your instructor
#SBATCH --reservation=scwXXXX_YY
# specify the partition, change to dev on Hawk
#SBATCH --partition=development
###

command1 &
command2 &
command3 &
wait

This will run command1, command2 and command3 simultaneously. The --ntasks=3 option ensures that Slurm allocates three CPU cores for this, and the wait command ensures that all processes complete before Slurm releases the allocation.

This method has its limits if we want to run multiple tasks after the first ones have completed. It’s possible, but scaling it will be harder.

GNU Parallel

GNU Parallel is a utility specially designed to run multiple parallel jobs. It can execute a set number of tasks at a time and when they are complete run more tasks.

GNU Parallel can be loaded a module called parallel. Its syntax is a bit complex, but gives you access to a lot of power and flexibility.

A simple GNU Parallel example

For this example we’ll just run on a quick test on the head node. First we have to load the module for parallel.

module load parallel

Citing Software

Each time you run GNU Parallel it will remind that you academic tradition requires you to cite the software you used. You can stop this message by running parallel --citation once and Parallel will then remember not to show this message anymore. Running this will also show you the BibTeX code for citing parallel in your papers.

The command below will run ls to list all the files in the current directory and it will send the list of files to Parallel. Parallel will in turn run the echo command on each input it was given. The {1} means to use the first argument (and in this case its the only one) as the parameter to the echo command.

ls | parallel echo {1}

As a short hand we could have also run the command

ls | parallel echo

and it would produce the same output.

An alternate syntax for the same command is:

parallel echo {1} ::: $(ls)

Here, the ::: is a separator, indicating that the arguments to Parallel are finished, and what follows is a list of items to work through in parallel.

A more complex example

As an example we’re going to use the example data from the Software Carpentry Unix Shell lesson. This features some data from a researcher named Nelle who is studying the North Pacfic Gyre. She orginally had 17 data files, each of which measure the relative abundnace of 300 different proteins. But she has now collected some extra data and has 6000 files to process. Each file is named NENE followed by a 5 digit number identifying the sample and finally an A or a B to identify which of two machines analysed the sample.

Downloading the Data

First we need to download Nelle’s data from the Software Carpentry website. This can be downloaded with the wget command, the files then need to be extracted from the zip archive with the unzip command.

wget http://supercomputingwales.github.io/SCW-tutorial/data/north-pacific-gyre.zip
unzip north-pacific-gyre.zip

The data we’ll be using is now extracted into the directory north-pacific-gyre go ahead and change into this directory by typing:

cd north-pacific-gyre

There are five subdirectories for data gathered on different days. The 2012-07-03 contains the original 17 files from the Unix Shell lesson, the others each contain 1500 new files.

Nelle needs to run a program called goostats on each file to process it. These can be processed in series with the following set of commands:

# Calculate stats for data files.
cd north-pacific-gyre
for datafile in 2012-07-03/NENE*[AB].txt
do
    echo $datafile
    bash goostats $datafile $datafile.stats
done

The NENE*[AB].txt expression returns all the files which start with NENE and end either A.txt or B.txt. The for loop will work through the list of files produced by ls one by one, and runs goostats on each one.

Lets convert this process to run in parallel by using GNU Parallel instead. By running

parallel bash goostats {1} {1}.stats ::: 2012-07-03/NENE*[AB].txt

We’ll run the same program in parallel. GNU parallel will automatically run on every core on the system, if there are more files to process than there are cores it will run a task on each core and then move on to the next once those finish. If we insert the time command before both the serial and parallel versions of this process we should see the parallel version runs several times faster.

Processing a larger dataset with GNU Parallel

We’ve already processed the small 17 file dataset using GNU Parallel, now we’re going to try and process one of the large 1500 file datasets. Do the following to see how much faster it is in parallel:

Process the first 30 files of the 2012-07-04 dataset serially and measure how long this takes using the time command.

Calculate how long it would take to process all 1500 files serially.

Process all 1500 files in the 2012-07-04 dataset in parallel and measure how long this takes. Use the ps a -u <userid> | grep "bash goostats" command to see how many processes are running.

Use the command lscpu to see how many CPU cores you have. GNU Parallel will automatically try to use them all. How did your actual running time in part 3 compare to the theoretical best you could have achieved?
Solution

1.
time for filename in 2012-07-04/NENE000[012]*.txt ; do bash goostats $filename $filename.stats ; done 
Or
time for filename in ${ls 2012-07-04/NENE*.txt | head -n 30} ; do bash goostats $filename $filename.stats ; done 
Time taken (on sunbird login node) about 1 minute.

1 minute for 30 files = 2 seconds per file, 1500 files = 3000 seconds = 50 minutes

time ls 2012-07-04/NENE*.txt | parallel bash goostats {1} {1}.stats Takes around 36 seconds on Sunbird login node, uses 88 parallel processes. You might see 90 processes but one of those is grep itself and the other is the parallel master process.

Should go 88 times faster, 3000/88 = 34, got 36 seconds. 34/36 = 0.9469 or about 95% of the maximum speed.

Using a list stored in a file

Frequently it is more convenient to specify a list of files, or other arguments, to process by listing them in a file rather than typing them out at the command line. For example, in Nelle’s workflow, she may want to ensure that the analysis always tries exactly the same file list, even if one is missing, so she will be alerted to its absence.

To create the file list, recall that we can use > to redirect output.

ls 2012-07-03/NENE*[AB].txt > files_to_process.txt

Now, to tell Parallel to use this file as a list of arguments, we can use :::: instead of :::.

parallel bash goostats {1} {1}.stats :::: files_to_process.txt

Running Parallel under Slurm

To process using Parallel on a single node, we can use a job submission script very similar to the ones we have been using so far. Since each compute node on Sunbird and Hawk has 40 cores, Parallel will automatically run 40 different parameters at once. We need to be careful to request the whole node so that we don’t use cores that aren’t allocated to us.

First lets create a job submission script and call it parallel_1node.sh.

#!/bin/bash --login
###
#SBATCH --nodes 1                      # request everything runs on the same node
#SBATCH --exclusive                    # request that we get exclusive use of this node
#SBATCH --output output.%J                   # Job output
#SBATCH --time 00:01:00                    # Max wall time for entire job
# specify our current project
# replace XXXX with the code provided by your instructor
#SBATCH --account=scwXXXX
# specify the reservation we have for the training workshop
# remove this for your own work
# replace XXXX and YY with the code provided by your instructor
#SBATCH --reservation=scwXXXX_YY
# specify the partition, change to dev on Hawk
#SBATCH --partition=development
###

# Ensure that parallel is available to us
module load parallel

# Run the tasks:
parallel bash goostats {1} {1}.stats :::: files_to_process.txt

We can then run this by using sbatch to submit parallel_1node.sh.

If we need to process a very large number of files or parameters, we might want to request to run on more than one node. One way of doing this is splitting the parameter set into subsets, and running multiple jobs. If the machine is very busy, this has the advantage that Slurm can fit a single-node job in whenever one node is free, rather than having to wait for a large number of nodes to become free at the same time. However, the downside is that you end up with many different submission scripts and parameter sets, so it gets easier to miss one.

To submit a single submission script that runs on many nodes using Parallel, we need to tell Parallel how to run programs on other nodes than the current one. Slurm provides a built-in program to do this called srun, which we used earlier to run on our interactive allocation. We also need to tell Parallel to run enough programs to fill all of the nodes that we have allocated. Let’s create a file parallel_multinode.sh.

#!/bin/bash --login
###
# Number of processors we will use (80 will fill two nodes)
#SBATCH --ntasks 80
# Output file location
#SBATCH --output output.%J
# Time limit for this job
#SBATCH --time 00:01:00
# specify our current project
# replace XXXX with the code provided by your instructor
#SBATCH --account=scwXXXX
# specify the reservation we have for the training workshop
# remove this for your own work
# replace XXXX and YY with the code provided by your instructor
#SBATCH --reservation=scwXXXX_YY
# specify the partition, change to dev on Hawk
#SBATCH --partition=development
###

# Ensure that parallel is available to us
module load parallel

# Define srun arguments:
srun="srun --nodes 1 --ntasks 1"
# --nodes 1 --ntasks 1         allocates a single core to each task

# Define parallel arguments:
parallel="parallel --max-procs $SLURM_NTASKS --joblog parallel_joblog"
# --max-procs $SLURM_NTASKS  is the number of concurrent tasks parallel runs, so number of CPUs allocated
# --joblog name     parallel's log file of tasks it has run

# Run the tasks:
$parallel "$srun bash goostats {1} {1}.stats" :::: files_to_process.txt

This script looks a bit more complicated than the ones we’ve used so far; the comments explain what each step does. To use this script for your own workloads, you can ignore the middle section that sets up things for Parallel; only the last line that calls your code, and the first few lines to control the job parameters, need to be adjusted.

Let’s go ahead and run the job by using sbatch to submit parallel_multinode.sh.

sbatch parallel_multinode.sh

This will take a minute or so to run. If we watch the output of sacct we should see 15 subjobs being created.

batch       batch               scw1000          4  COMPLETED      0:0
extern     extern               scw1000          4  COMPLETED      0:0
0            bash               scw1000          1  COMPLETED      0:0
1            bash               scw1000          1  COMPLETED      0:0
2            bash               scw1000          1  COMPLETED      0:0
3            bash               scw1000          1  COMPLETED      0:0
4            bash               scw1000          1  COMPLETED      0:0
5            bash               scw1000          1  COMPLETED      0:0
6            bash               scw1000          1  COMPLETED      0:0
7            bash               scw1000          1  COMPLETED      0:0
8            bash               scw1000          1  COMPLETED      0:0
9            bash               scw1000          1  COMPLETED      0:0
10           bash               scw1000          1  COMPLETED      0:0
11           bash               scw1000          1  COMPLETED      0:0
12           bash               scw1000          1  COMPLETED      0:0
13           bash               scw1000          1  COMPLETED      0:0
14           bash               scw1000          1  COMPLETED      0:0

The file parallel_joblog will contain a list of when each job ran and how long it took.

Seq     Host    Starttime       JobRuntime      Send    Receive Exitval Signal  Command
     :       1542803199.833       2.205      0       0       0       0       srun -n1 -N1 bash goostats NENE01729A.txt stats-NENE01729A.txt
     :       1542803199.835       2.250      0       0       0       0       srun -n1 -N1 bash goostats NENE01729B.txt stats-NENE01729B.txt
     :       1542803199.837       2.251      0       0       0       0       srun -n1 -N1 bash goostats NENE01736A.txt stats-NENE01736A.txt
     :       1542803199.839       2.282      0       0       0       0       srun -n1 -N1 bash goostats NENE01751A.txt stats-NENE01751A.txt
     :       1542803202.040       2.213      0       0       0       0       srun -n1 -N1 bash goostats NENE01751B.txt stats-NENE01751B.txt
     :       1542803202.088       2.207      0       0       0       0       srun -n1 -N1 bash goostats NENE01812A.txt stats-NENE01812A.txt
     :       1542803202.091       2.207      0       0       0       0       srun -n1 -N1 bash goostats NENE01843A.txt stats-NENE01843A.txt
     :       1542803202.124       2.208      0       0       0       0       srun -n1 -N1 bash goostats NENE01843B.txt stats-NENE01843B.txt
     :       1542803204.257       2.210      0       0       0       0       srun -n1 -N1 bash goostats NENE01978A.txt stats-NENE01978A.txt
    :       1542803204.297       2.173      0       0       0       0       srun -n1 -N1 bash goostats NENE01978B.txt stats-NENE01978B.txt
    :       1542803204.300       2.223      0       0       0       0       srun -n1 -N1 bash goostats NENE02018B.txt stats-NENE02018B.txt
    :       1542803204.336       2.230      0       0       0       0       srun -n1 -N1 bash goostats NENE02040A.txt stats-NENE02040A.txt
    :       1542803206.470       2.216      0       0       0       0       srun -n1 -N1 bash goostats NENE02040B.txt stats-NENE02040B.txt
    :       1542803206.472       2.276      0       0       0       0       srun -n1 -N1 bash goostats NENE02043A.txt stats-NENE02043A.txt
    :       1542803206.526       2.270      0       0       0       0       srun -n1 -N1 bash goostats NENE02043B.txt stats-NENE02043B.txt

Processing the entire dataset with GNU Parallel

We’re now going to process the entire dataset (6017 files) using Slurm and some compute nodes.

Create a list of all files using the ls command and store it in a file called files_to_process.txt.

Use the :::: operator in GNU Parallel and write a Slurm script to process all the files in your files_to_process.txt file.

Run your Slurm job, after it finishes check you have a stats file for each data file.
Solution
ls 2012-07-/.txt > files_to_process.txt
Check files with ls 2012-07-/.stats | wc -l (should give 6017) Slurm script:
#!/bin/bash --login
###
#SBATCH --ntasks 80
#SBATCH --output output.%J
#SBATCH --time 00:01:00
#SBATCH --account=scwXXXX
#SBATCH --reservation=scwXXXX_YY
#SBATCH --partition=development
###
module load parallel
srun="srun --nodes 1 --ntasks 1"
parallel="parallel --max-procs $SLURM_NTASKS --joblog parallel_joblog"
$parallel "$srun bash goostats {1} {1}.stats" :::: files_to_process.txt

More complex command handling with Parallel

We can run parallel with multiple arguments. For example

parallel echo "hello {1} {2}" ::: 1 2 3 ::: a b c

will run each possible combination of the first and second arguments to give:

hello 1 a
hello 1 b
hello 1 c
hello 2 a
hello 2 b
hello 2 c
hello 3 a
hello 3 b
hello 3 c

For example, if you had a list of image files in images.txt, and you wanted to perform an analysis of the three different colour channels, as well as greyscale, you might use the following:

parallel process_image --channel={1} {2} ::: red green blue grey :::: images.txt

This generalises to provide a concise way to perform very large parameter sweeps in parallel.

If we only want to run each argument as a pair, so there are only three outputs adding the + symbol to the end of the second ::: will achieve this:

parallel echo "hello {1} {2}" ::: 1 2 3 :::+ a b c

hello world 1 a
hello world 2 b
hello world 3 c

These options also work when using :::: to take the list from a file instead.

For example, if you again had a list of image files to process in images.txt, but now you wanted a different brightness cutoff for each, which you stored in a second file, brightnesses.txt, you could use something like:

parallel process_image --brightness={1} {2} :::: brightnesses.txt ::::+ images.txt

How parallel to be?

GNU Parallel works best when you have a much larger number of tasks than you have CPU cores. This is for two reasons: firstly, because when one task ends, Parallel will automatically start another one on the same core. If you have as many cores as you have tasks, then if some finish early then those cores will become idle. Secondly, requesting a larger number of cores means that Slurm has to find that many cores all available at the same time, so you will have a longer wait.

Imagine that you have 1,000 tasks (e.g. image files that need to be processed), each of which take between 1 and 5 minutes. Requesting 1,000 cores would mean Slurm would have to wait for almost a quarter of the machine to become available. Then if most jobs finished after 1 minute, but one particularly tough task took 5 minutes to process, then the 1,000 cores would all be reserved to you (but mostly sitting idle) for the entire 5 minutes. The wait to start might be a few hours, after which the job would finish in around five minutes.

If instead you requested 40 cores (i.e. one node), then Slurm would find it a lot easier to schedule your job—you’d be waiting on a single node (less than 1% of the cluster) to become available, and would likely start within a few minutes to an hour, unless the cluster was particularly busy. The run time would be a little longer—around half an hour—but the CPU cores would be fully occupied, and you would get your results within an hour or two of submitting the job, whereas the short, wide job would still be waiting to start.

Key Points

GNU Parallel lets a single Slurm job start multiple subprocesses

This helps to use all the CPUs on a node effectively.

previous episode

Introduction to High Performance Computing for Supercomputing Wales

next episode

Optimising for Parallel Processing

Overview

Optimising for Parallel Processing

Running a job on multiple cores

GNU Parallel

A simple GNU Parallel example

Citing Software

A more complex example

Downloading the Data

Processing a larger dataset with GNU Parallel

Solution

Using a list stored in a file

Running Parallel under Slurm

Processing the entire dataset with GNU Parallel

Solution

More complex command handling with Parallel

How parallel to be?

Key Points

previous episode

next episode