Reproducible experiments in parallel computing: Concepts and stencil compiler benchmark study

Abstract

For decades, the majority of the experiments on parallel computers have been reported at conferences and in journals usually without the possibility to verify the results presented. Thus, one of the major principles of science, reproducible results as a kind of correctness proof, has been neglected in the field of experimental high-performance computing. While this is still the state-of-the-art, current research targets for solutions to this problem. We discuss early results regarding reproducibility from a benchmark case study we did. In our experiments we explore the class of stencil calculations that are part of many scientific kernels and compare the performance results of four stencil compilers. In order to make these experiments reproducible from remote, a first prototype of an replication engine has been developed that can be accessed via the internet.