A framework for end-to-end simulation of highperformance computing systems

Abstract

We present an end-to-end simulation framework that is capable of simulating High-Performance Computing (HPC) systems with hundreds of thousands of interconnected processors. The tool applies discrete event simulation and is driven by real-world application traces. We refer to it as MARS (MPI Application Replay network Simulator). It maintains reasonable simulation details of both the processors in general and specifically the inter-connection network. Among other things, it features several network topologies, flexible routing schemes, arbitrary application task placement, point-to-point statistics collection, and data visualization. With a few case studies, we demonstrate the usefulness of this tool for assisting high-level system design as well as for performance projection and application tuning of future HPC systems.