Preliminary evaluation of a parallel trace replay tool for HPC network simulations

Abstract

This paper presents a preliminary evaluation of TraceR, a trace replay tool built upon the ROSS-based CODES simulation framework. TraceR can be used for predicting network performance and understanding network behavior by simulating messaging on interconnection networks. It addresses two major shortcomings in current network simulators. First, it enables fast and scalable simulations of large-scale supercomputer networks. Second, it can simulate production HPC applications using BigSim’s emulation framework. In addition to introducing TraceR, this paper studies the impact of input parameters on simulation performance. We also compare TraceR with other network simulators such as SST and BigSim, and demonstrate TraceR’s scalability using various case studies.