Elastic and scalable tracing and accurate replay of non-deterministic events

• Authors: Xing Wu;Frank Mueller
• Venue: Proceedings of the 27th international ACM conference on International conference on supercomputing
• Year: 2013

SCALATRACE represents the state-of-the-art of parallel application tracing for high performance computing (HPC). This paper presents SCALATRACE II, a next generation tracer that delivers even higher trace compression capability, even when events are not always regular. In this work, we contribute a spectrum of novel compression and replay techniques that are fundamentally different from our past approaches. SCALATRACE II features a redesigned low-level encoding scheme of trace data such that data elements are elastic and self explanatory. With this new encoding scheme, trace compression is enhanced by introducing innovative intra-node and inter-node trace compression algorithms that guarantee high compression rates in a loop structure agnostic fashion. In practice, the improved compression scheme is particularly efficient for scientific codes that demonstrate inconsistent behavior across time steps and nodes. A novel approach is further contributed to probabilistically replay sequences of non-deterministic events. To assess the compression efficacy of SCALATRACE II, we conduct experiments not only with computational kernels but also a real-world application, the Parallel Ocean Program (POP). Compared to the first generation SCALATRACE, we observe key improvements on trace compression for benchmarks with inconsistent time step behavior and diverging task level behavior while retaining timing accuracy even under probabilistic replay.