A publication of the Office of Advanced Simulation & Computing, NNSA Defense Programs
NA-ASC-500-07—Issue 3
May 2007
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Lawrence Livermore Researchers Win Best Paper Award at Computing Symposium
Lawrence Livermore researchers Bronis de Supinski and Martin Schulz, along with North Carolina State University faculty member Frank Mueller and his student Mike Noeth, won the best paper award in the software track for the 2007 International Parallel and Distributed Processing Symposium, held March 26 to 29 in Long Beach, CA.
Their paper, “Scalable Compression and Replay of Communication Traces in Massively Parallel Environments,” addresses the issue of significantly growing processor counts in high-end computer systems in terms of message passing interface (MPI) performance and current tool paradigms. For example, message passing trace mechanisms typically result in file sizes proportional to the number of processors and to the job’s execution time. Work highlighted in the paper presents new mechanisms for tracing MPI events, resulting in near-constant trace file sizes as problem size and/or processor counts are increased. Further, the compression mechanism automatically detects communication patterns that may facilitate the determination of good task mappings on architectures that provide significant rewards for recognizing a communication locality such as that of the ASC Program’s BlueGene/L computer. Further extensions to this work promise to detect anomalous MPI performance events in the traces automatically.
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