MPI-SIM: using parallel simulation to evaluate MPI programs

Abstract
This paper describes the design and implementation of MPI-SIM, a library for the execution driven parallel simulation of MPI programs. MPI-LITE, a portable library that supports multithreaded MPI is also de- scribed. MPI-SIM, which is built on top of MPI-LITE, can be used to predict the performance of existing MPI programs as a function of architectural characteristics including number of processors and message commu- nication latencies. The simulation models can be exe- cuted sequentially or in parallel. Parallel executions of MPI-SIM models are synchronized using a set of asyn- chronous conservative protocols. MPI-SIM reduces synchronization overheads by exploiting the communi- cation characteristics of the program that it simulates. The paper presents validation and performance results from the use of MPI-SIM to simulate applications from the NAS Parallel Benchmark suite. Using the tech- niques described in this paper, we were able to reduce the number of synchronizati ons in the parallel simula- tion as compared with the synchronous quantum proto- col and were able to achieve speedups ranging from 3.2-11.9 in going from sequential to parallel simulation using 16 processors on the IBM SP2.

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