I'm testing a simple MPI program on my desktop (Ubuntu LTS 16.04/ Intel® Core™ i3-6100U CPU @ 2.30GHz × 4/ gcc 4.8.5 /OpenMPI 3.0.0) and mpirun won't let me use all of the cores on my machine (4). When I run:
$ mpirun -n 4 ./test2
I get the following error:
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
There are not enough slots available in the system to satisfy the 4 slots
that were requested by the application:
./test2
Either request fewer slots for your application, or make more slots available
for use.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
But if I run with:
$ mpirun -n 2 ./test2
everything works fine.
I've seen from other answers that I can check the number of processors with
cat /proc/cpuinfo | grep processor | wc -l
and this tells me that I have 4 processors. I'm not interested in oversubscribing, I'd just like to be able to use all my processors. Can anyone help?
Your processor has 4 hyperthreads but only 2 cores (see the specs here).
By default, Open MPI does not run more than one MPI task per core. You can have Open MPI run up to one MPI task per hyperthread with the following option
mpirun --use-hwthread-cpus ...
FWIW
The command you mentioned reports the number of hyperthreads.
A better way to figure out the topology of a machine is via the lstopo command from the hwloc package.
MPI tasks are not bound on cores nor threads on OS X, so if you are running on a Mac, the --oversubscribe -np 4 would lead to the same result.