[Rd] R with ATLAS avoids Linux cpu affinity
Chris Jewell
chris.jewell at warwick.ac.uk
Mon Dec 6 16:43:34 CET 2010
Hi all,
I have a problem with cpu affinity in my R-2.11.1 installation compiled against ATLAS running on a Linux (Ubuntu 10.04) cluster under GridEngine. I wish to use Grid Engine's core binding feature to bind user processes into the number of cores they request on the cluster, thus preventing badly behaved multi-threaded libraries from consuming more cores than requested. An example of this is R compiled against multithreaded ATLAS, which needs to be bound into a single core if a user submits a 1 core job. Grid Engine achieves this through the sched_setaffinity system call under Linux 2.6. For most applications (including if I write a test C program that uses ATLAS BLAS), this works well, and prevents threads from 'leaking' outside the cpu set they are assigned. However, R appears to be able to avoid the core binding. This is *very* strange as I was under the impression that any child processes or threads inherit the cpu affinity of the parent.
Does anyone have experience of this and could offer a comment or solution?
Thanks,
Chris
--
Dr Chris Jewell
Department of Statistics
University of Warwick
Coventry
CV4 7AL
UK
Tel: +44 (0)24 7615 0778
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