Configurable synthetic application for studying malleability in HPC

Abstract

Nowadays, the throughput improvement in large clusters of computers recommends the development of malleable applications. Thus, during the execution of these applications in a job, the resource management system (RMS) can modify its resource allocation, in order to increase the global throughput. There are different alternatives to complete the different steps in which the reallocation of resources is decomposed. To find the best alternatives, this paper introduces a configurable synthetic iterative MPI malleable application capable of modifying, in execution time, the number of MPI processes according to several parameters. The application includes a performance module to measure stages time within steps, from processes management to data redistribution. In this way, the analysis of different scenarios will allow to conclude how the reconfiguration of application has to be made in different circumstances. At the same time, this tool can be used to create workloads that will allow to analyse the impact of malleability on a system and the work in progress.