An open-source family of tools to reproduce MPI-based workloads in interconnection network simulators

摘要

Simulation is often used in order to evaluate the behavior and the performance of computing systems. Specifically, in the field of high-performance interconnection networks for HPC clusters the simulation has been extensively considered to verify and validate network operation models and to evaluate their performance. Nevertheless, experiments conducted to evaluate network performance using simulation tools should be fed with realistic network traffic from real benchmarks and/or applications. This approach has grown in popularity because it allows to evaluate the simulation model under realistic traffic situations. In this paper, we propose a family of tools for modeling realistic workloads which capture the behavior of MPI applications into self-related traces called VEF traces. The main novelty of this approach is that it replays the MPI collective operations with their corresponding messages, offering an MPI message-based task simulation framework. The proposed framework neither provides a network simulator nor depends on any specific simulation plat-form. Besides, this framework allows us to use the generated traces by any third-party network simulator working at message level.