Automatic Generation of Executable Communication Specifications from Parallel Applications

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 parametrized 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. We subsequently generate benchmarks with identical run-time behavior from the collected traces in the CONCEPTUAL language, 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 of the original applications. This ability to automatically generate performance-accurate benchmarks from parallel applications is novel and without any precedence, to our knowledge.