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

• Authors: Alberto Núñez;Javier Fernández;Jose D. Garcia;Félix Garcia;Jesús Carretero
• Venue: The Journal of Supercomputing
• Year: 2010

In this work, we propose new techniques to analyze the behavior, the performance, and specially the scalability of High Performance Computing (in short, HPC) applications on different computing architectures. Our final objective is to test applications using a wide range of architectures (real or merely designed) and scaling it to any number of nodes or components. This paper presents a new simulation framework, called SIMCAN, for HPC architectures. The main characteristic of the proposed simulation framework is the ability to be configured for simulating a wide range of possible architectures that involve any number of components. SIMCAN is developed to simulate complete HPC architectures, but putting special emphasis on the storage and network subsystems. The SIMCAN framework can handle complete components (nodes, racks, switches, routers, etc.), but also key elements of the storage and network subsystems (disks, caches, sockets, file systems, schedulers, etc.). We also propose several methods to implement the behavior of HPC applications. Each method has its own advantages and drawbacks. In order to evaluate the possibilities and the accuracy of the SIMCAN framework, we have tested it by executing a HPC application called BIPS3D on a hardware-based computing cluster and on a modeled environment that represent the real cluster. We also checked the scalability of the application using this kind of architecture by simulating the same application with an increased number of computing nodes.