New techniques for simulating high performance MPI applications on large storage networks

Abstract

In this paper we present new techniques for simulating high performance MPI applications on large storage networks. Performance analysis of high performance application on large storage networks is a very complex and time-consuming task. However, modelling and studying the behaviour of any application on complex network architectures is crucial to obtain good performance. The goal of this work is to predict both scalability degree and performance of any high computing applications on any network architecture. A very interesting feature of this work is that our approach does not require to modify the application in order to simulate its behaviour. Also, there is no need to modify the simulator code to test different architectures. It can be done just creating a new configuration file. In order to perform those analyses we have used SIMCAN, a simulation tool to analyzing high-performance I/O architectures, developed at University Carlos III de Madrid. To validate this work we have used the BIPS3D application on several hardware-based architectures and on our simulator. The comparative results of those environments are presented to show the accuracy and efficiency of our approach.