Preliminary Evaluation of a Parallel Trace Replay Tool for HPC Network Simulations

Abstract

Support teams of high-performance computing (HPC) sys- tems often find themselves between a rock and a hard place: on one hand, they understandably administrate these large systems in a conservative way, but on the other hand, they try to satisfy their users by deploying up-to-date tool chains as well as libraries and scientific software. HPC system users often have no guarantee that they will be able to repro- duce results at a later point in time, even on the same system—software may have been upgraded, removed, or recompiled under their feet, and they have little hope of being able to reproduce the same software envi- ronment elsewhere. We present GNU Guix and the functional package management paradigm and show how it can improve reproducibility and sharing among researchers with representative use cases.