APMT: an automatic hardware counter-based performance modeling tool for HPC applications

Abstract

The ever-growing complexity of HPC applications and the computer architectures cost more efforts than ever to learn application behaviors. In this paper, we propose the APMT, an Automatic Performance Modeling Tool, to understand and predict performance efficiently in the regimes of interest to developers and performance analysts while outperforming many traditional techniques. In APMT, we use hardware counter-assisted profiling to identify the key kernels and non-scalable kernels and build each kernel model according to our performance modeling framework. Meantime, we also provide an optional refinement modeling framework to further understand the key performance metric, cycles-per-instruction (CPI). Our evaluations show that by only performing a few small-scale profiling, APMT is able to keep the average error rate around 15% with average performance overheads of 3% in different scenarios, including NAS parallel benchmarks, dynamical core of atmosphere model of the Community Earth System Model (CESM), and the ice component of CESM on commodity clusters. APMT improve the model prediction accuracies by 25–52% in strong scaling tests comparing to the well-known analytical model and the empirical model.