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Running TNT in parallel

Building upon the instructions given here and here I thought I’d write up one of the many useful things Pablo Goloboff kindly taught us at the TNT scripting workshop after the Hennig XXXI meeting.

It’s actually not the easiest thing to setup if you’re using Ubuntu… Pablo had to help me do it – I would never have got it up and running on my own.

THE FOLLOWING INSTRUCTIONS ASSUME YOU’RE USING UBUNTU ON A MULTICORE MACHINE

You’ll need to install the pvm package either from the repositories with

sudo apt get install pvm

or download and compile from source

It’s actually better to compile from source because the pvm package in the Ubuntu repositories is out of date – they provide only version 3.4.5, whilst the latest version of pvm, released way back in 2009 is 3.4.6 ! I guess the packaging team have other priorities…

Then you’ll need to configure pvm on your machine:

  • edit your bashrc file  nano ~/.bashrc  and insert this line:

export PVM_ROOT=/usr/lib/pvm3

save & close the bashrc file. Now  source ~/.bashrc and then test the path with echo $PVM_ROOT this should now return

/usr/lib/pvm3

  • in your user home directory (for me this is /home/ross/ ) create a plaintext file called hostlist (the exact name doesn’t matter but remember it) and write one line within this file:

rossnetbook ep=/usr/bin/

(replace ‘rossnetbook’ with your computer hostname – if you’re not sure what this is then nano /etc/hostname will tell you) save and close this file.

  • now start pvm from your user home directory with pvm hostlist  this tells pvm your hostname and the path. Unfortunately you’ll need to start-up pvm this way every time you restart your computer. Perhaps there’s a better way? Let me know if so…

Finally, make sure you’ve copied the 64-bit TNT binary to both /usr/bin/ & to your user home directory and make sure that they’re executable.

Now you should be ready to go…

if you get an error message like this from TNT:

tnt*>ptnt begin ajob2 2 = mult 5; return ; ptnt wait . ;
Macro language is ON
Macros: 50.5 Kb in use, 51.8 Kb free
libpvm [pid7539] /tmp/pvmd.1000: No such file or directory
libpvm [pid7539] /tmp/pvmd.1000: No such file or directory
libpvm [pid7539] /tmp/pvmd.1000: No such file or directory
libpvm [pid7539]: pvm_config(): Can’t contact local daemon

Can’t enter parallel interface (make sure PVM is running)

you’ve probably forgotten to start pvm with pvm hostlist

see the video I uploaded below for demonstration of the speed-up possible by performing tasks in parallel:

the video shows me performing a simple search on the zilla dataset of Chase et al. (1993) using traditional heuristic settings (60 reps) performed first in serial, then in parallel (starting after 2:00) 20 reps x 3 slaves.

100 seconds for search 1, down to just 48 seconds for search 2 (in parallel). YMMV

Neither of these searches found the shortest length trees btw!

Commands:
mxram 100; /* increase memory */
p zilla.tnt; /* read in the data */
hold 20000; /* increase the maximum number of trees held */
mult 60; /* perform a traditional search with 60 replications */
le; /* tree lengths */

/* parallel tnt job, called ‘ajob’ using 3 slaves performing ‘mult 20’ on each slave */
ptnt begin ajob 3 = mult 20; return ; ptnt wait . ;

basically just insert what you want your slaves to do in between the ‘=’ and the return; commands.

ptnt get ajob; /* get data back from slaves to master */

This was just the tip of the iceberg of the course. I can’t even begin to write-up the rest of the course in this much detail! But I hope this helps…

many many thanks Pablo, and all the organisers of this workshop AND the conference – it was *much* appreciated

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6 responses to “Running TNT in parallel”

  1. Jon Hill Avatar
    Jon Hill

    Best way to start PVM at boot is to use a cron command. Edit your crontab (crontab -e) and add a command like:

    @reboot  /usr/bin/pvm /home/jhill1/hotlist
    This should run the command at boot time and is future proof (at least whilst cron is around).

  2. Mike Taylor Avatar
    Mike Taylor

    Harder problem for me (should be trivial) — what to use for editing Nexus matricies? I was using NDE.EXE under Wine for a long while, but that’s stopped working in recent times. What else gets the job done?

    1. Ross Mounce Avatar

      gedit

       No, seriously. I don’t use fancy graphical programs to handle my 100’s of matrices. It’s worth also mentioning that the GUI version of TNT (which runs fine under Wine, in my experience) also serves as a matrix editor. One can even give character names – which I rarely ever see in .tnt files.

      1. Mike Taylor Avatar
        Mike Taylor

        I am a big-time text-editor lover: I’ve been using emacs since 1987, and for much of that time it’s been my mail-reader, Lisp interpreter and much more. But, come on, character-taxon matrices are just not suitable. When you’re editing those babies, you need to be able to easily navigate up and down (between taxa) and left and right (between characters), including complex states representing a single cell rather than sequences of characters; and you need to see the name of the character and the available states. Its not a complicated requirement, but it’s solid: to code without it is just inviting error.

        Trusty old NDE did all this (and nothing else). I miss it. I may end up having to re-implement it, which is really not what I want at all.

        1. Ross Mounce Avatar

          ah well, for *creating* or building matrices from scratch yes, NDE or some other such program might be better. But for ‘editing’ and manipulating already existing matrices, as I do for my research – text editors suffice :)

    2. Mike Taylor Avatar
      Mike Taylor

      Aha! To answer my own question, turns out there is now a MacOS X version of NDE itself, which is just perfect for my needs.