Synthetic traffic model of the Graph500 communications

Abstract

As BigData applications have gained momentum over the last years, the Graph500 benchmark has appeared in an attempt to steer the design of HPC systems to maximize the performance under memory-constricted application workloads. A realistic simulation of such benchmarks for architectural research is challenging due to size and detail limitations, and synthetic traffic workloads constitute one of the least resource-consuming methods to evaluate the performance. In this work, we propose a synthetic traffic model that emulates the behavior of the Graph500 communications. Our model is empirically obtained through a characterization of several executions of the benchmark with different input parameters. We verify the validity of our model against a characterization of the execution of the benchmark with different parameters. Our model is well-suited for implementation in an architectural simulator.