Characterizing communication patterns of parallel programs through graph visualization and analysis

Abstract

Characterization of communication patterns of parallel programs has been used to better understand the behavior of such programs as well as to predict performance of large scale applications. This characterization could be performed by observing some communication attributes like volume or spatial characteristics of message passing parallel applications in different scenarios. This paper describes a methodology to characterize parallel communication patterns using a graph visualization tool in addition to a traditional monitoring tool that generates trace files. Graph visualization tools are commonly used to analyze large network connections existent in a variety of social or natural structures. Although, since it is possible to represent large scale parallel programs as graphs of communicating processes, this paper proposes a methodology that takes advantage of such kind of tool to aid in characterize communication patterns.