NAME

       fi_mrail - The Multi-Rail Utility Provider

OVERVIEW

       The  mrail  provider (ofi_mrail) is an utility provider that layers over an underlying provider to enable
       the use of multiple network ports (rails).  This increases the total available bandwidth of an underlying
       provider.  The current status of mrail provider is experimental - not all libfabric features are support‐
       ed and performance is not guaranteed.

REQUIREMENTS

   Requirements for underlying provider
       mrail provider requires the underlying provider to support the following capabilities / modes:

       • Buffered receive (FI_BUFFERED_RECV)

       • FI_SOURCE

       • FI_AV_TABLE

   Requirements for applications
       Applications need to: * Support FI_MR_RAW  MR  mode  bit  to  make  use  of  FI_RMA  capability.   *  Set
       FI_OFI_MRAIL_ADDR env variable (see RUNTIME PARAMETERS section below).

SUPPORTED FEATURES

       Endpoint types
              The provider supports only FI_EP_RDM.

       Endpoint capabilities
              The following data transfer interface is supported: FI_MSG, FI_TAGGED, FI_RMA.

       # LIMITATIONS
              Limitations  of  the  underlying  provider  may show up as that of mrail provider.  mrail provider
              doesn’t allow pass-through of any mode bits to the underlying provider.

   Unsupported features
       The following are the major libfabric features that are not supported.  Any other feature not  listed  in
       “Supported features” can be assumed as unsupported.

       • FI_ATOMIC

       • Scalable endpoints

       • Shared contexts

       • FABRIC_DIRECT

       • Multicast

       • Triggered operations

FUNCTIONALITY OVERVIEW

       For  messages (FI_MSG, FI_TAGGED), the provider uses different policies to send messages over one or more
       rails based on message size (See FI_OFI_MRIAL_CONFIG in the RUNTIME  PARAMETERS  section).   Ordering  is
       guaranteed through the use of sequence numbers.

       For RMA, the data is striped equally across all rails.

RUNTIME PARAMETERS

       The ofi_mrail provider checks for the following environment variables.

       FI_OFI_MRAIL_ADDR
              Comma  delimited list of individual rail addresses.  Each address can be an address in FI_ADDR_STR
              format, a host name, an IP address, or a netdev interface name.

       FI_OFI_MRAIL_ADDR_STRC
              Deprecated.  Replaced by FI_OFI_MRAIL_ADDR.

       FI_OFI_MRAIL_CONFIG
              Comma separated list of <max_size>:<policy> pairs, sorted in ascending order of <max_size>.   Each
              pair  indicated  the rail sharing policy to be used for messages up to the size <max_size> and not
              covered by all previous pairs.  The value of <policy> can be fixed (a fixed rail is used),  round-
              robin  (one  rail  per message, selected in round-robin fashion), or striping (striping across all
              the rails).  The default configuration is 16384:fixed,ULONG_MAX:striping.  The value ULONG_MAX can
              be input as -1.

SEE ALSO

       fabric(7), fi_provider(7), fi_getinfo(3)

AUTHORS

       OpenFabrics.

Libfabric Programmer’s Manual                      2024-12-10                                        fi_mrail(7)