Improving the performance of the extreme-scale simulator

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2 Scopus citations

Abstract

Investigating the performance of parallel applications at scale on future high-performance computing (HPC) architectures and the performance impact of different architecture choices is an important component of HPC hardware/software co-design. The Extreme-scale Simulator (xSim) is a simulation-based toolkit for investigating the performance of parallel applications at scale. xSim scales to millions of simulated Message Passing Interface (MPI) processes. The overhead introduced by a simulation tool is an important performance and productivity aspect. This paper documents two improvements to xSim: (1) a new deadlock resolution protocol to reduce the parallel discrete event simulation management overhead and (2) a new simulated MPI message matching algorithm to reduce the oversubscription management overhead. The results clearly show a significant performance improvement, such as by reducing the simulation overhead for running the NAS Parallel Benchmark suite inside the simulator from 1,020% to 238% for the conjugate gradient (CG) benchmark and from 102% to 0% for the embarrassingly parallel (EP) and benchmark, as well as, from 37,511% to 13,808% for CG and from 3,332% to 204% for EP with accurate process failure simulation.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationProceedings - IEEE International Symposium on Distributed Simulation and Real-Time Applications, DS-RT
PublisherInstitute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Inc.
Pages198-207
Number of pages10
ISBN (Electronic)9781479961443
DOIs
StatePublished - Nov 13 2014
Event18th IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Distributed Simulations and Real Time Applications, DS-RT 2014 - Toulouse, France
Duration: Oct 1 2014Oct 3 2014

Publication series

NameProceedings - IEEE International Symposium on Distributed Simulation and Real-Time Applications, DS-RT
ISSN (Print)1550-6525

Conference

Conference18th IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Distributed Simulations and Real Time Applications, DS-RT 2014
Country/TerritoryFrance
CityToulouse
Period10/1/1410/3/14

Keywords

  • High-performance Computing
  • Message Passing Interface
  • Parallel Discrete Event Simulation
  • Performance Prediction

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