On 4/26/2010 2:31 AM, Asad Ali wrote:


On Mon, Apr 26, 2010 at 8:01 PM, Ashley Pittman <ashley@pittman.co.uk> wrote:

On 25 Apr 2010, at 22:27, Asad Ali wrote:

> Yes I use different machines such as
>
> machine 1 uses AMD Opterons. (Fedora)
>
> machine 2 and 3 use Intel Xeons. (CentOS)
>
> machine 4 uses slightly older Intel Xeons. (Debian)
>
> Only machine 1 gives correct results.  While CentOS and Debian results are same but are wrong and different from those of machine 1.

Have you verified the are actually wrong or are they just different?  It's actually perfectly possible for the same program to get different results from run to run even on the same hardware and the same OS.  All floating point operations by the MPI library are expected to be deterministic but changing the process layout or and MPI settings can affect this and of course anything the application does can introduce differences as well.

Ashley.

The code is the same with the same input/output and the same constants etc. From run to run the results can only be different if you either use different input/output or use different random number seeds. Here in my case the random number seeds are the same as well. This means that this code must give (and it does) the same results no matter how many times you run it. I didn't tamper with mpi-settings for any run. I have verified that results of only Fedora are correct because I know what is in my data and how should my model behave and I get a nearly perfect convergence on Fedora OS. Even my dual core laptop with Ubuntu 9.10 also gives correct results. The other OSs give the same results for a few hundred iterations as Fedora but then an unusual thing happens and the results start getting wrong.
If you're really interested in solving your "problem,"  you'll have to consider important details such as which compiler was used, which options (e.g. 387 vs. sse), run-time setting of x87 or SSE control registers, 32- vs. 64-bit compilation.  SSE2 is the default for 64-bit compilation, but compilers vary on defaults for 32-bit.  If your program depends on x87 extra precision of doubles, or efficient mixing of double and long double, 387 code may be a better choice, but limits your efficiency.
-- 
Tim Prince