Terminology for nodes, processes and cores is confusing

[Ian Hinder]

SimFactory's terminology for nodes, processes and cores (http://simfactory.org/info/documentation/userguide/processterminology.html) is confusing.

We should come up with a new scheme which is more consistent and intuitive. If we use new names for the options and variables, we can support both the old and new schemes at the same time, and provide a simple mapping from one to the other.

Keyword:

[Barry Wardell]

The main confusion is that procs could mean either processors or processes. SimFactory uses procs with the implied meaning of processors, whereas most people seem to expect it to mean processes. Would a rename of 'procs' to 'cores' eliminate all of the confusion?

[Ian Hinder]

It sometimes also means "processes" I think. In those cases, it should be renamed to "processes".

[Erik Schnetter]

The file "doc/processterminology.rst" explains the concepts. In this file, I use "machine", "node", and "core" for hardware concepts, and "job", "process", and "thread" for execution concepts. I could not find a good replacement for "process", which is easily confused with "processor".

Renaming variables and/or options would be a good idea.

[Frank Löffler]

With this in mind it might be also good to have a 'noop' option for submit which would print, in nice long language, what it would do, for example (please improve):

'submitting job on 16 nodes using 32 MPI processes with 4 threads per process (2 processes with a total of 8 threads per node).'

I would totally use this before a lot of my job submissions. :)

[Erik Schnetter]

That's a nice idea.

The output is already there, only the "-n" option is missing.

[Bruno Mundim]

I like Frank's idea too. Also regarding the choice of "process", that could be confused for processors, but not for cores and in this case Barry's idea could be modified to add --cores instead of renaming --procs to --cores, choosing the word task or mpi-task would be a good alternative to process.