[simgrid.git] / doc / FAQ.doc

/*! \page faq Frequently Asked Questions

\htmlinclude FAQ.toc

\section faq_installation Installing the SimGrid library

Many people have been asking me questions on how to use SimGrid. Quite
often, the questions were not really about SimGrid but on the
installation process. This section is intended to help people that are
not familiar with compiling C files under UNIX. If you follow these
instructions and still have some troubles, drop an e-mail to
<simgrid-user@lists.gforge.inria.fr>.

\subsection faq_compiling Compiling SimGrid

Suppose you have uncompressed SimGrid in some temporary location of
your home directory (say <tt>/home/joe/tmp/simgrid-2.18.2 </tt>). The
simplest way to use SimGrid is to install it in your home
directory. Change your directory to
<tt>/home/joe/tmp/simgrid-2.18.2</tt> and type

\verbatim./configure --prefix=$HOME
make
make install
\endverbatim

If at some point, something fails, you can report me this problem but,
please, avoid sending a laconic mail like "There is a problem. Is it
normal ?". Send me the config.log file which is automatically
generated by configure. Try to capture both the standard output and
the error output of the <tt>make</tt> command. There is no way for me
to help you if you do not give me a little bit of information.

Now, the following directory should have been created : 

      \li <tt>/home/joe/doc/simgrid/html/</tt>
      \li <tt>/home/joe/lib/</tt>
      \li <tt>/home/joe/include/</tt>

SimGrid is not a binary, it is a library. Both a static and a dynamic
version are available. Here is what you can find if you try a <tt>ls
/home/joe/lib</tt>:

\verbatim libsimgrid.a  libsimgrid.la  libsimgrid.so  libsimgrid.so.0 libsimgrid.so.0.0.1
\endverbatim

Thus, there is two ways to link your program with SimGrid:
      \li Either you use the static version, e.g 
\verbatim gcc libsimgrid.a -o MainProgram MainProgram.c
\endverbatim
          In this case, all the SimGrid functions are directly
          included in <tt>MainProgram</tt> (hence a bigger binary).
      \li Either you use the dynamic version (the preferred method)
\verbatim gcc -lsimgrid -o MainProgram MainProgram.c
\endverbatim
          In this case, the SimGrid functions are not included in
          <tt>MainProgram</tt> and you need to set your environment
          variable in such a way that <tt>libsimgrid.so</tt> will be
          found at runtime. This can be done by adding the following
          line in your .bashrc (if you use bash and if you have
          installed the SimGrid libraries in your home directory):
\verbatim export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=$HOME/lib/:$LD_LIBRARY_PATH
\endverbatim

\subsection faq_setting Setting up your own code

Do not build your simulator by modifying the SimGrid examples.  Go
outside the SimGrid source tree and create your own working directory
(say <tt>/home/joe/SimGrid/MyFirstScheduler/</tt>).

Suppose your simulation has the following structure (remember it is
just an example to illustrate a possible way to compile everything;
feel free to organize it as you want).

      \li <tt>sched.h</tt>: a description of the core of the
          scheduler (i.e. which functions are can be used by the
          agents). For example we could find the following functions
          (master, forwarder, slave).

      \li <tt>sched.c</tt>: a C file including <tt>sched.h</tt> and
          implementing the core of the scheduler. Most of these
          functions use the MSG functions defined in section \ref
          msg_gos_functions.

      \li <tt>masterslave.c</tt>: a C file with the main function, i.e.
          the MSG initialization (MSG_global_init()), the platform
          creation (e.g. with MSG_create_environment()), the
          deployment phase (e.g. with MSG_function_register() and
          MSG_launch_application()) and the call to
          MSG_main()).

To compile such a program, I suggest to use the following Makefile. It
is a generic Makefile that I generally use with my students when I
teach the C language.

\verbatim
all: masterslave 
masterslave: masterslave.o sched.o

INSTALL_PATH = $$HOME
CC = gcc
PEDANTIC_PARANOID_FREAK =       -O0 -Wshadow -Wcast-align \
                                -Waggregate-return -Wmissing-prototypes -Wmissing-declarations \
                                -Wstrict-prototypes -Wmissing-prototypes -Wmissing-declarations \
                                -Wmissing-noreturn -Wredundant-decls -Wnested-externs \
                                -Wpointer-arith -Wwrite-strings -finline-functions
REASONABLY_CAREFUL_DUDE =       -Wall
NO_PRAYER_FOR_THE_WICKED =      -w -O2 
WARNINGS =                      $(REASONABLY_CAREFUL_DUDE)
CFLAGS = -g $(WARNINGS)

INCLUDES = -I$(INSTALL_PATH)/include
DEFS = -L$(INSTALL_PATH)/lib/
LDADD = -lm -lsimgrid 
LIBS = 

%: %.o
        $(CC) $(INCLUDES) $(DEFS) $(CFLAGS) $^ $(LIBS) $(LDADD) -o $@ 

%.o: %.c
        $(CC) $(INCLUDES) $(DEFS) $(CFLAGS) -c -o $@ $<

clean:
        rm -f $(BIN_FILES) *.o *~
.SUFFIXES:
.PHONY : clean

\endverbatim

The first two lines indicates what should be build when typing make
(<tt>masterslave</tt>) and of which files it is to be made of
(<tt>masterslave.o</tt> and <tt>sched.o</tt>). This makefile assumes
that you have set up correctly your <tt>LD_LIBRARY_PATH</tt> variable
(look, there is a <tt>LDADD = -lm -lsimgrid</tt>). If you prefer using
the static version, remove the <tt>-lsimgrid</tt> and add a
<tt>$(INSTALL_PATH)/lib/libsimgrid.a</tt> on the next line, right
after the <tt>LIBS = </tt>.

More generally, if you have never written a Makefile by yourself, type
in a terminal : <tt>info make</tt> and read the introduction. The
previous example should be enough for a first try but you may want to
perform some more complex compilations...

\section faq_simgrid I'm new to SimGrid. I have some questions. Where should I start ?

You are at the right place... Having a look to these
<a href="http://graal.ens-lyon.fr/~alegrand/articles/Simgrid-Introduction.pdf">slides</a>
may give you some insights on what SimGrid can help you to do and what
are its limitations. Then you definitely should read the \ref
MSG_examples. There is also a mailing list: <simgrid-user@lists.gforge.inria.fr>.

\subsection faq_generic Building a generic simulator

Please read carefully the \ref MSG_examples. You'll find in \ref
MSG_ex_master_slave a very simple consisting of a master (that owns a bunch of
tasks and distributes them) , some slaves (that process tasks whenever
they receive one) and some forwarder agents (that simply pass the
tasks they receive to some slaves).

\subsection faq_examples I want some more complex examples !

Many people have come to ask me a more complex example and each time,
they have realized afterward that the basics were in the previous three
examples. 

Of course they have often been needing more complex functions like
MSG_process_suspend(), MSG_process_resume() and
MSG_process_isSuspended() (to perform synchronization), or
MSG_task_Iprobe() and MSG_process_sleep() (to avoid blocking
receptions), or even MSG_process_create() (to design asynchronous
communications or computations). But the examples are sufficient to
start.

I know I should add some more examples, but not some more complex
ones... I should add some examples that illustrate some other
functionalities (like how to simply encode asynchronous
communications, RPC, process migrations, thread synchronization, ...)
and I will do it when I will have a little bit more time. I have tried
to document the examples so that they are understandable. I know it is
not really satisfying but it is the best I have managed to do yet.

\subsection faq_platform Building a realistic platform

I can speak more than an hour on this subject and I still do not have
the right answer, just some ideas. You can read the following
<a href="http://graal.ens-lyon.fr/~alegrand/articles/Simgrid-Introduction.pdf">slides</a>.
It may give you some hints. You can also have a look at the
<tt>tools/platform_generation/</tt> directory. There is a perl-script
I use to annotate a Tiers generated platform (may not be up-to-date
though).

\subsection faq_visualization Visualizing the schedule

It is sometime convenient to "see" how the agents are behaving. If you
like colors, you can use <tt>tools/MSG_visualization/colorize.pl </tt>
as a filter to your MSG outputs. It works directly with INFO. Beware,
INFO() prints on stderr. Do not forget to redirect if you want to
filter (e.g. with bash): 
\verbatim 
./msg_test small_platform.xml small_deployment.xml 2>&1 | ../../tools/MSG_visualization/colorize.pl
\endverbatim

We also have a more graphical output. Have a look at MSG_paje_output(). It 
generates an input to <a href="http://www-id.imag.fr/Logiciels/paje/">Paje</a>.
<center>
\htmlonly
 <a href="Paje_MSG_screenshot.jpg"><img src="Paje_MSG_screenshot_thn.jpg"></a>
\endhtmlonly
</center>

\subsection faq_context_1000 I want thousands of simulated processes

SimGrid can use either pthreads library or the UNIX98 contextes. On most
systems, the number of pthreads is limited and then your simulation may be
limited for a stupid reason. This is especially true with the current linux
pthreads, and I cannot get more than 2000 simulated processes with pthreads
on my box. The UNIX98 contextes allow me to raise the limit to 25,000
simulated processes on my laptop.

The <tt>--with-context</tt> option of the <tt>./configure</tt> script allows
you to choose between UNIX98 contextes (<tt>--with-context=ucontext</tt>)
and the pthread version ( (<tt>--with-context=pthread</tt>). The default
value is ucontext when the script detect a working UNIX98 context
implementation. On Windows boxes, the provided value is discarded and an
adapted version is picked up.

We experienced some issues with contextes on some rare systems (solaris 8
and lower comes to mind). The main problem is that the configure script
detect the contextes as being functional when it's not true. If you happen
to use such a system, switch manually to the pthread version, and provide us
with a good patch for the configure script so that it is done automatically ;)

\subsection faq_context_10000 I want hundred thousands of simulated processes

As explained above, SimGrid can use UNIX98 contextes to represent and handle
the simulated processes. Thanks to this, the main limitation to the number
of simulated processes becomes the available memory. 

Here are some tricks I had to use in order to run a token ring between
25,000 processes on my laptop (1Gb memory, 1.5Gb swap).

 - First of all, make sure your code runs for a few hundreds processes
   before trying to push the limit. Make sure it's valgrind-clean, ie that
   valgrind does not report neither memory error nor memory leaks. Indeed,
   numerous simulated processes result in *fat* simulation hindering debugging.

 - It was really boring to write 25,000 entries in the deployment file, so I wrote 
   a little script <tt>examples/gras/tokenS/make_deployment.pl</tt>, which you may
   want to adapt to your case.

 - The deployment file became quite big, so I had to do what is in the FAQ
   entry \ref faq_flexml_limit

 - Each UNIX98 context has its own stack entry. As debugging this is quite 
   hairly, the default value is a bit overestimated so that user don't get 
   into trouble about this. You want to tune this size to increse the number 
   of processes. This is the <tt>STACK_SIZE</tt> define in 
   <tt>src/xbt/context_private.h</tt>, which is 128kb by default.
   Reduce this as much as you can, but be warned that if this value is too 
   low, you'll get a segfault. The token ring example, which is quite simple, 
   runs with 40kb stacks.


\section faq_SG Where has SG disappeared ?!?

OK, it's time to explain what's happening to the SimGrid project. Let's
start with a little bit of history.

* Historically, SimGrid was a low-level toolkit for scheduling with
classical models such as DAGs. That was SimGrid v.1.* aka SG, written by
Henri Casanova. I had been using it in its earliest versions during an
internship at UCSD.

Then we have realized that encoding distributed algorithm in SG was a
real pain.

* So we have built MSG on top of SG and have released SimGrid v.2.*. MSG
offered a very basic API to encode a distributed application easily.
However encoding MSG on top of SG was not really convenient and did not
use the DAG part since the control of the task synchronization was done
on top of MSG and no more in SG. We have been playing a little bit with
MSG. We have realized that:

   \li 1) the platform modeling was quite flexible and could be "almost"
       automated (e.g. using random generator and post-annotations);

   \li 2) SG was the bottleneck because of the way we were using
       it. We needed to simulate concurrent transfers, complex load
       sharing mechanisms. Many optimizations (e.g. trace integration)
       were totally inefficient when combined with MSG and made extending SG
       to implement new sharing policies, parallel tasks models, or failures
       (many people were asking for these kind of features) a real pain;

   \li 3) the application modeling was not really easy. Even though the
       application modeling depends on people's applications, we thought
       we could improve things here. One of our target here was realistic
distributed applications ranging from computer sensor networks like
the NWS to peer-to-peer applications;

* So we have been planning mainly two things for SimGrid 3:

   \li 1) I have proposed to get rid of SG and to re-implement a new kernel
       that would be faster and more flexible. That is what I did in the
end of 2004: SURF. SURF is based on a fast max-min linear solver
using O(1) data-structures. I have quickly replaced SG by SURF in
MSG and the result has been that on the MSG example, the new
version was more than 10 times faster while we had gain a lot of
flexibility. I think I could still easily make MSG faster but I
have to work on MSG now (e.g. using some of the O(1)
data-structures I've been using to build SURF) since it has become
the bottleneck. Some MSG functions have been removed from the API
but they were mainly intended to build the platform by hand (they
had appeared in the earliest versions of MSG) and were therefore
not useful anymore since we are providing a complete mechanism to
automatically build the platform and deploy the agents on it.;

   \li 2) GRAS is a new project Martin and I have come up with. The idea is
to have a programming environment that let you program real
distributed applications while letting you the ability to run it in
the simulator without having to change the slightest line of your
code. From the simulation point of view, GRAS performs the
application modeling automatically... Up until now, GRAS works on
top MSG for historical reasons but I'm going to make it work
directly on top of SURF so that it can use all the flex and the
speed provided by SURF.

Those two things are working, but we want to make everything as clean as
possible before releasing SimGrid v.3.

So what about those nice DAGs we used to have in SimGrid v.1. ? They're not
anymore in SimGrid v.3. Let me recall you the way SimGrid 3 is organized:

\verbatim
________________
|   User code  |
|______________|
| | MSG | GRAS |
| -------------|
| |   SURF     |
| -------------|
|     XBT      |
----------------
\endverbatim

XBT is our tool box and now, you should have an idea of what the other ones
are. As you can see, the primitive SG is not here anymore. However it could
still be brought back if people really need it. Here is how it would fit.

\verbatim
______________________
|    User code       |
|____________________|
| | MSG | GRAS | SG  |
| -------------------|
| |      SURF        |
| -------------------|
|        XBT         |
----------------------
\endverbatim

Re-implementing SG on top of SURF is really straightforward (it only
requires a little bit of time that I really don't have right now)
since the only thing that lacks to SURF is the DAG part. But adding it
to SURF would slow it down and therefore slow MSG and GRAS which is
not a good thing.  However it is really not on the top of our TODO
list because we have to work on GRAS, and its MPI counterpart, and a
parallel task model, and ... Anyway, we finally have migrated our CVS
to gforge so people that are interested by helping on this part will
have the possibility to do it.

\subsection faq_SG_DAG But I wanted to implement a distributed dynamic scheduler of DAGs... How can I do that it SG is not available anymore in the next versions ?

Distributed is somehow "contagious". If you start making distributed
decisions, there is no way to handle DAGs directly anymore (unless I am
missing something). You have to encode your DAGs in term of communicating
process to make the whole scheduling process distributed. Believe me, it is
worth the effort since you'll then be able to try your algorithms in a very
wide variety of conditions.

If you decide that the distributed part is not that much important and that
DAG is really the level of abstraction you want to work with (but it
prevents you from having "realistic" platform modeling), then you should
keep using the 2.18.5 versions until somebody has ported SG on top of SURF.
Note however that SURF will be slower than the old SG to handle traces with
a lots of variations (there is no trace integration anymore).


\subsection faq_SURF_dynami How can I have variable resource availability?

A nice feature of SimGrid is that it enables you to seamlessly have
resources whose availability change over time. When you build a
platform, you generally declare CPUs like that:

\verbatim
  <cpu name="Cpu A" power="100.00"/>
\endverbatim 

If you want the availability of "CPU A" to change over time, the only
thing you have to do is change this definition like that:

\verbatim
  <cpu name="Cpu A" power="100.00" availability_file="trace_A.txt" state_file="trace_A_failure.txt"/>
\endverbatim

For CPUs, availability files are expressed in fraction of available
power. Let's have a look at what "trace_A.txt" may look like:

\verbatim
PERIODICITY 1.0
0.0 1.0
11.0 0.5
20.0 0.9
\endverbatim

At time 0, our CPU will deliver 100 Mflop/s. At time 11.0, it will
deliver only 50 Mflop/s until time 20.0 where it will will start
delivering 90 Mflop/s. Last at time 21.0 (20.0 plus the periodicity
1.0), we'll be back to the beginning and it will deliver 100Mflop/s.

Now let's look at the state file:
\verbatim
PERIODICITY 10.0
1.0 -1.0
2.0 1.0
\endverbatim

A negative value means "off" while a positive one means "on". At time
1.0, the CPU is on. At time 1.0, it is turned off and at time 2.0, it
is turned on again until time 12 (2.0 plus the periodicity 10.0). It
will be turned on again at time 13.0 until time 23.0, and so on.

Now, let's look how the same kind of thing can be done for network
links. A usual declaration looks like:

\verbatim
  <network_link name="LinkA" bandwidth="10.0" latency="0.2"/>
\endverbatim

You have at your disposal the following options: bandwidth_file,
latency_file and state_file. The only difference with CPUs is that
bandwidth_file and latency_file do not express fraction of available
power but are expressed directly in Mb/s and seconds.

\section faq_flexml_bypassing How could I have some C functions do what the platform and deployment files do?

So you want to bypass the XML files parser, uh? Maybe doin some parameter
sweep experiments on your simulations or so? This is possible, but it's not
really easy. Here is how it goes.

For this, you have to first remember that the XML parsing in SimGrid is done
using a tool called FleXML. Given a DTD, this gives a flex-based parser. If
you want to bypass the parser, you need to provide some code mimicking what
it does and replacing it in its interactions with the SURF code. So, let's
have a look at these interactions.

FleXML parser are close to classical SAX parsers. It means that a
well-formed SimGrid platform XML file might result in the following
"events":

  - start "platform_description"
  - start "cpu" with attributes name="host1" power="1.0"
  - end "cpu"
  - start "cpu" with attributes name="host2" power="2.0"
  - end "cpu"
  - start "network_link" with ...
  - end "network_link"
  - start "route" with ...
  - end "route"
  - start "route" with ...
  - end "route"
  - end "platform_description"

The communication from the parser to the SURF code uses two means:
Attributes get copied into some global variables, and a surf-provided
function gets called by the parser for each event. For example, the event
  - start "cpu" with attributes name="host1" power="1.0"

let the parser do the equivalent of:
\verbatim
  strcpy("host1",A_cpu_name);
  A_cpu_power = 1.0;
  (*STag_cpu_fun)();
\endverbatim

In SURF, we attach callbacks to the different events by initializing the
pointer functions to some the right surf functions. Example in
workstation_KCCFLN05.c (surf_parse_open() ends up calling surf_parse()):
\verbatim
  // Building the routes
  surf_parse_reset_parser();
  STag_route_fun=parse_route_set_endpoints;
  ETag_route_element_fun=parse_route_elem;
  ETag_route_fun=parse_route_set_route;
  surf_parse_open(file);
  xbt_assert1((!surf_parse()),"Parse error in %s",file);
  surf_parse_close();
\endverbatim
    
So, to bypass the FleXML parser, you need to write your own version of the
surf_parse function, which should do the following:
   - Call the corresponding STag_<tag>_fun function to simulate tag start
   - Fill the A_<tag>_<attribute> variables with the wanted values
   - Call the corresponding ETag_<tag>_fun function to simulate tag end
   - (do the same for the next set of values, and loop)

Then, tell SimGrid that you want to use your own "parser" instead of the stock one:
\verbatim
  surf_parse = surf_parse_bypass;
  MSG_create_environment(NULL);
\endverbatim

An example of this trick is distributed in the file examples/msg/msg_test_surfxml_bypassed.c

\section faq_flexml_limit I get the message "surf_parse_lex: Assertion `next<limit' failed."

This is because your platform file is too big for the parser. 

Actually, the message comes directly from FleXML, the technology on top of
which the parser is built. FleXML has the bad idea of fetching the whole
document in memory before parsing it. And moreover, the memory buffer size
must be determinded at compilation time.

We use a value which seems big enough for our need without bloating the
simulators footprints. But of course your mileage may vary. In this case,
just edit src/surf/surfxml.l modify the definition of
FLEXML_BUFFERSTACKSIZE. E.g.

\verbatim
#define FLEXML_BUFFERSTACKSIZE 1000000000
\endverbatim

Then recompile and everything should be fine, provided that your version of
Flex is recent enough (>= 2.5.31). If not the compilation process should
warn you.

A while ago, we worked on FleXML to reduce a bit its memory consumtion, but
these issues remain. There is two things we should do:

  - use a dynamic buffer instead of a static one so that the only limit
    becomes your memory, not a stupid constant fixed at compilation time
    (maybe not so difficult).
  - change the parser so that it does not need to get the whole file in
    memory before parsing
    (seems quite difficult, but I'm a complete newbe wrt flex stuff).

These are changes to FleXML itself, not SimGrid. But since we kinda hijacked
the development of FleXML, I can grant you that any patches would be really
welcome and quickly integrated.

\section faq_host_load Where is the get_host_load function hidden in MSG?

There is no such thing because its semantic wouldn't be really clear. Of
course, it is something about the amount of host throughput, but there is as
many definition of "host load" as people asking for this function.

It may be instantaneous value or an average one. Moreover it may be only the
power of the computer, or may take the background load into account, or may
even take the currently running tasks into account. In some SURF models,
communications have an influence on computational power. Should it be taken
into account too?

So, we decided not to include such a function into MSG and let people do it
thereselves so that they get the value matching exactly what they mean. One
possibility is to run active measurement as in next code snippet. It is very
close from what you would have to do out of the simulator, and thus gives
you information that you could also get in real settings to not hinder the
realism of your simulation. 

\verbatim
double get_host_load() {
   m_task_t task = MSG_task_create("test", 0.001, 0, NULL);
   double date = MSG_get_clock();

   MSG_task_execute(task);
   date = MSG_get_clock() - date;
   MSG_task_destroy(task);
   return (0.001/date);
}
\endverbatim

Of course, it may not match your personal definition of "host load". In this
case, please detail what you mean on the mailing list, and we will extend
this FAQ section to fit your taste if possible.


\author Arnaud Legrand (arnaud.legran::imag.fr)
\author Martin Quinson (martin.quinson::loria.fr)


*/