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.