A case study in top-down performance estimation for a large-scale parallel application

  • Authors:
  • Ilya Sharapov;Robert Kroeger;Guy Delamarter;Razvan Cheveresan;Matthew Ramsay

  • Affiliations:
  • Sun Microsystems, Santa Clara, CA;Sun Microsystems, Santa Clara, CA;Sun Microsystems, Santa Clara, CA;Sun Microsystems, Santa Clara, CA;Sun Microsystems, Santa Clara, CA

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the eleventh ACM SIGPLAN symposium on Principles and practice of parallel programming
  • Year:
  • 2006

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Abstract

This work presents a general methodology for estimating the performance of an HPC workload when running on a future hardware architecture. Further, it demonstrates the methodology by estimating the performance of a significant scientific application -- the Gyrokinetic Toroidal Code (GTC) -- when executing on Sun's proposed next-generation petascale computer architecture.For GTC, we identify the important phases of the iteration and perform low-level analysis that includes instruction tracing and component simulations of processor and memory systems. Low-level analysis is complemented with scalability estimates based on modeling MPI, OpenMP and I/O activity in the code. The work's approach permits accurate end-to-end performance projections from the microarchitecture level to the petascale.