Developing Parallel Scripts


PGENESIS augments the script language used in serial GENESIS with a handful of commands that are largely extensions of serial GENESIS commands. These allow the modeler to specify networks that span a set of processors, and control these multi-processor simulations. We describe how one can do this task in two common situations:

  • Decomposing Large Networks
  • Parameter Searching
  • Development and debugging of parallel scripts is best done in a workstation environment, rather than on a supercomputer (often with a batch environment). The workstation debugging facilities are superior, interactive access is usually better, and production runs are a more efficient use of supercomputer-class resources.

    Our suggested development path for large-scale simulations is:

  • Interactive single-CPU
  • Interactive multi-CPU
  • Supercomputer batch job
  • For the interactive runs we recommend that you install PGENESIS on your own machine(s) and do your script development locally.  Once you have your parallel script running correctly (even on a much reduced problem size), then you are better prepared to transfer your scripts to a supercomputer and perform production runs.