Automatic generation of executable communication specifications from parallel applications

Abstract

Portable parallel benchmarks are widely used and highly effective for (a) the evaluation, analysis and procurement of high-performance computing (HPC) systems and (b) quantifying the potential benefits of porting applications for new hardware platforms. Yet, past techniques to synthetically parameterized hand-coded HPC benchmarks prove insufficient for today's rapidly-evolving scientific codes particularly when subject to multi-scale science modeling or when utilizing domain-specific libraries. To address these problems, this work contributes novel methods to automatically generate highly portable and customizable communication benchmarks from HPC applications. We utilize ScalaTrace, a lossless, yet scalable, parallel application tracing framework to collect selected aspects of the run-time behavior of HPC applications, including communication operations and execution time, while abstracting away the details of the computation proper. We subsequently generate benchmarks with identical run-time behavior from the collected traces. A unique feature of our approach is that we generate benchmarks in CONCEPTUAL, a domain-specific language that enables the expression of sophisticated communication patterns using a rich and easily understandable grammar yet compiles to ordinary C + MPI. Experimental results demonstrate that the generated benchmarks are able to preserve the run-time behavior - including both the communication pattern and the execution time - of the original applications. Such automated benchmark generation is particularly valuable for proprietary, export-controlled, or classified application codes: when supplied to a third party. Our auto-generated benchmarks ensure performance fidelity but without the risks associated with releasing the original code. This ability to automatically generate performance-accurate benchmarks from parallel applications is novel and without any precedence, to our knowledge.