MPI on HPC

[gtdang]

I've been testing out the GUI on Brown's HPC system (OSCAR). Running simulations with the MPI backend is not working because it's requesting too many processors than the instance allows. The node that my instance is running on has 48 cores, but my instance is not allotted access to all the node's cores.

https://github.com/jonescompneurolab/hnn-core/blob/18830b53c4602c8e0f9b89502222b27799c5e3ae/hnn_core/gui/gui.py#L1916-L1918 The GUI initializes the backend at the lines above using multiprocessing.cpu_count, which returns the node's total but not my instance's allotment.

The joblib backend allows you to specify the number of cores in with the GUI. Is there a reason why this option is not exposed for MPI?

joblib options

MPI options

This stack overflow answer also has a way to get the number of available cores instead of total.