FACT: fast communication trace collection for parallel applications through program slicing

A proper understanding of communication patterns 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 that are time-consuming and expensive. In this paper, 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 the communication traces. The program slice preserves all the variables and statements in the original program relevant to spatial and volume communication attributes. Our idea is based on an observation that most computation and message contents in message-passing parallel...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2009
• Where: SC
• Authors: Jidong Zhai, Tianwei Sheng, Jiangzhou He, Wenguang Chen, Weimin Zheng
• Keywords: Applied Computing, Communication Patterns, Communication Traces, Parallel Applications, SC 2009