Run It

From Linear Mixed Models Toolbox
Revision as of 06:52, 2 December 2020 by Boerner (talk | contribs)
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Operation System

lmt is available for Linux operation systems only.

Run time environment

lmt is developed for Linux operation systems on computers with an Intel architecture. Thus using lmt on AMD architecture will result in increased run time. For executables running on Windows or Mac please contact the author.

lmt requires that some environment variables are set to specific values. lmt will check those settings at start and will stop if the settings are wrong.

  • stack size must be set to unlimited via ulimit -s unlimited
  • OMP_DYNAMIC=FALSE
  • OMP_STACKSIZE='a reasonable value (i.e. 2000M)'
  • OMP_NESTED=TRUE

lmt is highly threaded and will try to use all available computing resources. Will this is desirable for very large models it can hamper performance when crunching medium to small data sets resulting in an increased run time. What "medium to small" means de- pends on the actual computer and must therefore be determined by the user. The user can set the lmt threading behaviour via the two environment variables OMP_NUM_THREADS and MKL_NUM_THREADS.

The performance of multi-threaded programs can also be heavily affected by thread affinity settings where the optimal settings must be found via trial and error. However, as a starting point, it is advisable to set the environment variable KMP_AFFINITY=granularity=core,scatter.

If you run several instances of lmt at the same time on the same computer you may experience a severe drop in performance of each of the runs. This is usually caused by competition for resources and therefore parallel runs of several lmt instances should be avoided. However, using the numactl environment may provide an option to avoid performance drops. Please check out numactl --help for further reading.

Run modes

lmt can run in parameterfile mode and in "@" mode. lmt is always started from command line. With no other commandline arguments provided lmt will run in parameter file mode and it will assume a parameter file named "para.xml" to be available in the runtime directory. For the content of the parameter file see

In "@" mode lmt changes its functionality conditional on the argument following the "@". Currently there is only one "@" mode available which is "@ped".