Hello all,

I have never seen that before. Looks like a memory corruption (write beyond the allocated memory block) which tends to not get noticed until the next free().

My suggestion would be to look for malloc debug options:

https://www.gnu.org/software/libc/manual/html_node/Heap-Consistency-Checking...

in particular the section on the MALLOC_CHECK_ env variable:

--8<-- When MALLOC_CHECK_ is set to a non-zero value, a special (less efficient) implementation is used which is designed to be tolerant against simple errors, such as double calls of free with the same argument, or overruns of a single byte (off-by-one bugs). --8<--

You may also want to add:

-roe -b no

to the cactus command line in the run script to disable output buffering and get one out and err file per MPI rank.

Yours Roland

We are having some issues running the Einstein Toolkit with ourSpritz code on the Frontera cluster at TACC and I'm wondering if any of you ever saw the error you can find in the stderr attached to this email.

The error is *corrupted size vs. prev_size: 0x00002b3728001060 **** and it looks like the code crashes within a call to CCTK_WARN.

We used both the May and November 2020 versions of the Einstein Toolkit and they both produce the same error. We are currently a bit lost, also because the same code and par file run fine on another cluster (MarconiA3 at CINECA in Italy). We actually also tried a different parfile (that calls anyway the same routine) and the same problem happens on Frontera (but not on MarconiA3).

It may well be a bug within Spritz when calling the CCTK_WARN function (that for some reason does not show up on other machines) or a compilation problem on Frontera. Have you seen a similar error? Do you have some suggestions on how to debug it?

Thanks, Bruno