3 research outputs found
An Approach for Realistically Simulating the Performance of Scientific Applications on High Performance Computing Systems
Scientific applications often contain large, computationally-intensive, and
irregular parallel loops or tasks that exhibit stochastic characteristics.
Applications may suffer from load imbalance during their execution on
high-performance computing (HPC) systems due to such characteristics. Dynamic
loop self-scheduling (DLS) techniques are instrumental in improving the
performance of scientific applications on HPC systems via load balancing.
Selecting a DLS technique that results in the best performance for different
problems and system sizes requires a large number of exploratory experiments. A
theoretical model that can be used to predict the scheduling technique that
yields the best performance for a given problem and system has not yet been
identified. Therefore, simulation is the most appropriate approach for
conducting such exploratory experiments with reasonable costs. This work
devises an approach to realistically simulate computationally-intensive
scientific applications that employ DLS and execute on HPC systems. Several
approaches to represent the application tasks (or loop iterations) are compared
to establish their influence on the simulative application performance. A novel
simulation strategy is introduced, which transforms a native application code
into a simulative code. The native and simulative performance of two
computationally-intensive scientific applications are compared to evaluate the
realism of the proposed simulation approach. The comparison of the performance
characteristics extracted from the native and simulative performance shows that
the proposed simulation approach fully captured most of the performance
characteristics of interest. This work shows and establishes the importance of
simulations that realistically predict the performance of DLS techniques for
different applications and system configurations