Proteo: a framework for the generation and evaluation of malleable MPI applications

Abstract

Applying malleability to HPC systems can increase their productivity without degrading or even improving the performance of running applications. This paper presents Proteo, a configurable framework that allows to design benchmarks to study the effect of malleability on a system, and also incorporates malleability into a real application. Proteo consists of two modules: SAM allows to emulate the computational behavior of iterative scientific MPI applications, and MaM is able to reconfigure a job during execution, adjusting the number of processes, redistributing data, and resuming execution. An in-depth study of all the possibilities shows that Proteo is able to behave like a real malleable or non-malleable application in the range [0.85, 1.15]. Furthermore, the different methods defined in MaM for process management and data redistribution are analyzed, concluding that asynchronous malleability, where reconfiguration and application execution overlap, results in a 1.15$$\times$$ × speedup.