Mercury

Mercury is an RPC framework specifically designed for use in HPC systems that allows asynchronous transfer of parameters and execution requests, as well as direct support of large data arguments. The network implementation is abstracted, allowing easy porting to future systems and efficient use of existing native transport mechanisms. Mercury's interface is generic and allows any function call to be serialized.

Please see the accompanying COPYING file for license details.

Contributions and patches are welcomed but require a Contributor License Agreement (CLA) to be filled out. Please contact us if you are interested in contributing to Mercury by subscribing to the mailing lists.

Architectures supported

Architectures supported by MPI implementations are generally supported by the network abstraction layer. The OFI libfabric plugin as well as the SM plugin are stable and provide the best performance in most workloads. Libfabric providers currently supported are: tcp, verbs, psm2, gni. MPI and BMI (tcp) plugins are still supported but gradually being moved as deprecated, therefore should only be used as fallback methods. The CCI plugin is deprecated and underlying CCI transport plugins (tcp, sm, verbs, gni) are no longer supported.

See the plugin requirements section for plugin requirement details.

Documentation

Please see the documentation available on the mercury website for a quick introduction to Mercury.

Software requirements

Compiling and running Mercury requires up-to-date versions of various software packages. Beware that using excessively old versions of these packages can cause indirect errors that are very difficult to track down.

Plugin requirements

To make use of the libfabric/OFI plugin, please refer to the libfabric build instructions available on this page.

To make use of the native NA SM (shared-memory) plugin on Linux, the cross-memory attach (CMA) feature introduced in kernel v3.2 is required. The yama security module must also be configured to allow remote process memory to be accessed (see this page). On MacOS, code signing with inclusion of the na_sm.plist file into the binary is currently required to allow process memory to be accessed.

To make use of the BMI plugin, the most convenient way is to install it through spack or one can also do:

git clone https://xgitlab.cels.anl.gov/sds/bmi.git && cd bmi
./prepare && ./configure --enable-shared --enable-bmi-only
make && make install

To make use of the MPI plugin, Mercury requires a well-configured MPI implementation (MPICH2 v1.4.1 or higher / OpenMPI v1.6 or higher) with MPI_THREAD_MULTIPLE available on targets that will accept remote connections. Processes that are not accepting incoming connections are not required to have a multithreaded level of execution.

To make use of the CCI plugin, please refer to the CCI build instructions available on this page.

Optional requirements

For optional automatic code generation features (which are used for generating serialization and deserialization routines), the preprocessor subset of the BOOST library must be included (Boost v1.48 or higher is recommended). The library itself is therefore not necessary since only the header is used. Mercury includes those headers if one does not have BOOST installed and wants to make use of this feature.

On Linux OpenPA v1.0.3 or higher is required (the version that is included with MPICH can also be used) for systems that do not have stdatomic.h (GCC version less than 4.9).

Building

If you install the full sources, put the tarball in a directory where you have permissions (e.g., your home directory) and unpack it:

gzip -cd mercury-X.tar.gz | tar xvf -

or

bzip2 -dc mercury-X.tar.bz2 | tar xvf -

Replace 'X' with the version number of the package.

(Optional) If you checked out the sources using git (without the --recursive option) and want to build the testing suite (which requires the kwsys submodule) or use checksums (which requires the mchecksum submodule), you need to issue from the root of the source directory the following command:

git submodule update --init

Mercury makes use of the CMake build-system and requires that you do an out-of-source build. In order to do that, you must create a new build directory and run the ccmake command from it:

cd mercury-X
mkdir build
cd build
ccmake .. (where ".." is the relative path to the mercury-X directory)

Type 'c' multiple times and choose suitable options. Recommended options are:

BUILD_SHARED_LIBS                ON (or OFF if the library you link
                                 against requires static libraries)
BUILD_TESTING                    ON
Boost_INCLUDE_DIR                /path/to/include/directory
CMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX             /path/to/install/directory
MERCURY_ENABLE_DEBUG             ON/OFF
MERCURY_ENABLE_PARALLEL_TESTING  ON/OFF
MERCURY_USE_BOOST_PP             ON
MERCURY_USE_CHECKSUMS            ON
MERCURY_USE_SYSTEM_BOOST         ON/OFF
MERCURY_USE_SYSTEM_MCHECKSUM     ON/OFF
MERCURY_USE_XDR                  OFF
NA_USE_BMI                       ON/OFF
NA_USE_MPI                       ON/OFF
NA_USE_CCI                       ON/OFF
NA_USE_OFI                       ON/OFF
NA_USE_SM                        ON/OFF

Setting include directory and library paths may require you to toggle to the advanced mode by typing 't'. Once you are done and do not see any errors, type 'g' to generate makefiles. Once you exit the CMake configuration screen and are ready to build the targets, do:

make

(Optional) Verbose compile/build output:

This is done by inserting VERBOSE=1 in the make command. E.g.:

make VERBOSE=1

Installing

Assuming that the CMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX has been set (see previous step) and that you have write permissions to the destination directory, do from the build directory:

 make install

Testing

Tests can be run to check that basic RPC functionality (requests and bulk data transfers) is properly working. CTest is used to run the tests, simply run from the build directory:

ctest .

(Optional) Verbose testing:

This is done by inserting -V in the ctest command. E.g.:

ctest -V .

Extra verbose information can be displayed by inserting -VV. E.g.:

ctest -VV .

Some tests run with one server process and X client processes. To change the number of client processes that are being used, the MPIEXEC_MAX_NUMPROCS variable needs to be modified (toggle to advanced mode if you do not see it). The default value is automatically detected by CMake based on the number of cores that are available. Note that you need to run make again after the makefile generation to use the new value.

FAQ

Below is a list of the most common questions.

• Q: Why am I getting undefined references to libfabric symbols?

  A: In rare occasions, multiple copies of the libfabric library are installed on the same system. To make sure that you are using the correct copy of the libfabric library, do:

  ldconfig -p | grep libfabric
  

  If the library returned is not the one that you would expect, make sure to either set LD_LIBRARY_PATH or add an entry in your /etc/ld.so.conf.d directory.

• Q: Is there any logging mechanism?

  A: To turn on error/warning/debug logs, the HG_LOG_LEVEL or HG_NA_LOG_LEVEL environment variables can be set to either error, warning or debug values. Note that for debugging output to be printed, the CMake variable MERCURY_ENABLE_DEBUG must also be set at compile time.