Scalable Multi-purpose Network Representation for Large Scale Distributed System Simulation
CCGRID '12 Proceedings of the 2012 12th IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Cluster, Cloud and Grid Computing (ccgrid 2012)
On the validity of flow-level tcp network models for grid and cloud simulations
ACM Transactions on Modeling and Computer Simulation (TOMACS)
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Simulation is a popular approach for predicting the performance of MPI applications for platforms that are not at one's disposal. It is also a way to teach the principles of parallel programming and high-performance computing to students without access to a parallel computer. In this work we present SMPI, a simulator for MPI applications that uses on-line simulation, i.e., the application is executed but part of the execution takes place within a simulation component. SMPI simulations account for network contention in a fast and scalable manner. SMPI also implements an original and validated piece-wise linear model for data transfer times between cluster nodes. Finally SMPI simulations of large-scale applications on large-scale platforms can be executed on a single node thanks to techniques to reduce the simulation's compute time and memory footprint. These contributions are validated via a large set of experiments in which SMPI is compared to popular MPI implementations with a view to assess its accuracy, scalability, and speed.