- the maxCommsSize variable is used to 'chunk' large data transfers
(eg, with PstreamBuffers) into a multi-pass send/recv sequence.
The send/recv windows for chunk-wise transfers:
iter data window
---- -----------
0 [0, 1*chunk]
1 [1*chunk, 2*chunk]
2 [2*chunk, 3*chunk]
...
Since we mostly send/recv in bytes, the current internal limit
for MPI counts (INT_MAX) can be hit rather quickly.
The chunking limit should thus also be INT_MAX, but since it is
rather tedious to specify such large numbers, can instead use
maxCommsSize = -1
to specify (INT_MAX-1) as the limit.
The default value of maxCommsSize = 0 (ie, no chunking).
Note
~~~~
In previous versions, the number of chunks was determined by the
sender sizes. This required an additional MPI_Allreduce to establish
an overall consistent number of chunks to walk. This additional
overhead each time meant that maxCommsSize was rarely actually
enabled.
We can, however, instead rely on the send/recv buffers having been
consistently sized and simply walk through the local send/recvs until
no further chunks need to be exchanged. As an additional enhancement,
the message tags are connected to chunking iteration, which allows
the setup of all send/recvs without an intermediate Allwait.
ENH: extend UPstream::probeMessage to use int64 instead of int for sizes
ENH: eliminate unnecessary duplicate communicator
- in globalMeshData previously had a comm_dup hack to avoid clashes
with deltaCoeffs calculations. However, this was largely due to a
manual implementation of reduce() that used point-to-point
communication. This has since been updated to use an MPI_Allreduce
and now an MPI_Allgather, neither of which need this hack.
