Pattern Recognition Techniques Applied to the Abstraction of Traces of Inter-Process Communication

The large number of processors in high performance computing and distributed applications is becoming a major challenge in the analysis of the way an application's processes communicate with each other. In this paper, we propose an approach that facilitates the understanding of large traces of inter-process communication by extracting communication patterns that characterize their main behavior. Two algorithms are proposed. The first one permits the recognition of repeating patterns in traces of MPI (Message Passing Interface) applications whereas the second algorithm searches if a given communication pattern occurs in a trace. Both algorithms are based on the n-gram extraction technique used in natural language processing. Unlike existing work, our approach operates on the trace as it is generated (i.e. on the fly) and does not require complex and computationally-expensive data structures. We show the effectiveness and efficiency of our approach in detecting communication patterns from large traces generated from two target systems.