In message-passing applications, the temporal or spatial distance between cause and symptom of a performance problem constitutes a major difficulty in deriving helpful conclusions from performance data. So just knowing the locations of wait states in the program is often insufficient to understand the reason for their occurrence. We therefore present a method for verifying hypotheses on causal connections between temporally or spatially distant performance phenomena without altering the application itself. The verification is accomplished by modifying MPI event traces and using them to simulate the hypothetical message-passing behavior. By performing a parallel real-time reenactment of the communication to be simulated using the original execution configuration, we can achieve high scalability and satisfactory predictive accuracy in relation to the measured behavior. Not relying on a potentially complex model of the message-passing subsystem, our method is also platform independent.
When aiming for large scale parallel computing, waiting time due to network latency, synchronization, and load imbalance are the primary opponents of high parallel efficiency. A common approach to hide latency with computation is the use of non-blocking communication. In the presence of a consistent load imbalance, synchronization cost is just the visible symptom of the load imbalance. Tasking approaches as in OpenMP, TBB, OmpSs, or C++20 coroutines promise to expose a higher degree of concurrency, which can be distributed on available execution units and significantly increase load balance. Available MPI non-blocking functionality does not integrate seamlessly into such tasking parallelization. In this work, we present a slim extension of the MPI interface to allow seamless integration of non-blocking communication with available concepts of asynchronous execution in OpenMP and C++.
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