SC Conference - Activity Details

Jidong Zhai  (Tsinghua University)

Tianwei Sheng  (Tsinghua University)

Jiangzhou He  (Tsinghua University)

Wenguang Chen  (Tsinghua University)

Weimin Zheng  (Tsinghua University)

Performance Tools

Tuesday,  03:30PM - 04:00PM

Room PB252

Communication pattern of parallel applications is important to optimize application performance and design better communication subsystems. Communication patterns can be obtained by analyzing communication traces. However, existing approaches to generate communication traces need to execute the entire parallel applications on full-scale systems which are time-consuming and expensive. We propose a novel technique, called FACT, which can perform FAst Communication Trace collection for large-scale parallel applications on small-scale systems. Our idea is to reduce the original program to obtain a program slice through static analysis, and to execute the program slice to acquire communication traces. We have implemented FACT and evaluated it with NPB programs and Sweep3D. The results show that FACT can reduce resource consumptions by two orders of magnitude in most cases. For example, FACT collects communication traces of 512-process Sweep3D in just 6.79 seconds, consuming 1.25GB memory, while the original program takes 256.63 seconds and consumes 213.83GB memory.

The full paper can be found in the ACM Digital Library and IEEE Computer Society