TY - GEN
T1 - Preserving time in large-scale communication traces
AU - Ratn, Prasun
AU - Mueller, Frank
AU - De Supinski, Bronis R.
AU - Schulz, Martin
PY - 2008
Y1 - 2008
N2 - Analyzing the performance of large-scale scientific applications is becoming increasingly difficult due to the sheer size of performance data gathered. Recent work on scalable communication tracing applies online interprocess compression to address this problem. Yet, analysis of communication traces requires knowledge about time progression that cannot trivially be encoded in a scalable manner during compression. We develop scalable time stamp encoding schemes for communication traces. At the same time, our work contributes novel insights into the scalable representation of time stamped data. We show that our representations capture sufficient information to enable what-if explorations of architectural variations and analysis for path-based timing irregularities while not requiring excessive disk space. We evaluate the ability of several time-stamped compressed MPI trace approaches to enable accurate timed replay of communication events. Our lossless traces are orders of magnitude smaller, if not near constant size, regardless of the number of nodes while preserving timing information suitable for application tuning or assessing requirements of future procurements. Our results prove timepreserving tracing without loss of communication information can scale in the number of nodes and time steps, which is a result without precedent.
AB - Analyzing the performance of large-scale scientific applications is becoming increasingly difficult due to the sheer size of performance data gathered. Recent work on scalable communication tracing applies online interprocess compression to address this problem. Yet, analysis of communication traces requires knowledge about time progression that cannot trivially be encoded in a scalable manner during compression. We develop scalable time stamp encoding schemes for communication traces. At the same time, our work contributes novel insights into the scalable representation of time stamped data. We show that our representations capture sufficient information to enable what-if explorations of architectural variations and analysis for path-based timing irregularities while not requiring excessive disk space. We evaluate the ability of several time-stamped compressed MPI trace approaches to enable accurate timed replay of communication events. Our lossless traces are orders of magnitude smaller, if not near constant size, regardless of the number of nodes while preserving timing information suitable for application tuning or assessing requirements of future procurements. Our results prove timepreserving tracing without loss of communication information can scale in the number of nodes and time steps, which is a result without precedent.
KW - High-Performance Computing
KW - Message Passing
KW - Tracing
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=57349170105&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1145/1375527.1375537
DO - 10.1145/1375527.1375537
M3 - Conference contribution
AN - SCOPUS:57349170105
SN - 9781605581583
T3 - Proceedings of the International Conference on Supercomputing
SP - 46
EP - 55
BT - ICS'08 - Proceedings of the 2008 ACM International Conference on Supercomputing
T2 - 22nd ACM International Conference on Supercomputing, ICS'08
Y2 - 7 June 2008 through 12 June 2008
ER -