Is there a size limit of variable in MPI_bcast?

I have the latest MPICH2 (3.0.4) compiled with intel fort compiler in a quad-core, dual CPU (Intel Xeon) machine.

I am encountering one MPI_bcast problem where, I am unable to broadcast the array

gpsi(1:201,1:381,1:38,1:20,1:7)

making it an array of size 407410920. When I try to broadcast this array I have the following error

Fatal error in PMPI_Bcast: Other MPI error, error stack:
PMPI_Bcast(1525)......: MPI_Bcast(buf=0x7f506d811010, count=407410920,
MPI_DOUBLE_PRECISION, root=0, MPI_COMM_WORLD) failed
MPIR_Bcast_impl(1369).: 
MPIR_Bcast_intra(1160): 
MPIR_SMP_Bcast(1077)..: Failure during collective
rank 1 in job 31  Grace_52261   caused collective abort of all ranks
  exit status of rank 1: killed by signal 9 
MPI launch string is: mpiexec -n 2    %B/tvdbootstrap 
Testing MPI configuration with 'mpich2version'
Exit value was 127 (expected 0), status: execute_command_t::exited
Launching MPI job with command: mpiexec -n 2    %B/tvdbootstrap 
Server args: -callback 127.0.0.1:4142 -set_pw 65f76672:41f20a5c

So the question, is there a limit in the size of variable in MPI_bcast or is the size of my array is more than what it can handle?

Solution

Yes, there is a limit. It's usually 2^31 so about two billion elements. You say your array has 407 million elements so it seems like it should work. However, if the limit is two billion bytes, then you are exceeding it by about 30%. Try cutting your array size in half and see if that works.

See: Maximum amount of data that can be sent using MPI::Send