Hintdump: a small utility for poking at MPI implementations.

by Latham, Robert J.

For years I’ve had a little tool in my home directory that does an MPI_File_open and reads out all the hints associated with that file. It was so simple and dumb I never put it on github. Now a new crop of machines has me realizing it might be useful to more people. So here you go:

https://github.com/roblatham00/hintdump

I can use this simple little tool to do a few things:

  • Verify ROMIO is using the ADIO driver I think it’s using (the romio_filesystem_type hint)
  • See what file systems this MPI implementation might support (try out different prefixes like ufs: or lustre:)
  • Verify stripe counts — I found one MPI implementation that would not honor stripe counts set by info objects, and would only honor stripe counts set with that file system’s utilities.

I hope you find this useful.