Traces generation to simulate large-scale distributed applications

Abstract

In order to study the performance of scheduling algorithms, simulators of parallel and distributed applications need accurate models of the application's behavior during execution. For this purpose, traces of low-level events collected during the actual execution of real applications are needed. Collecting such traces is a difficult task due to the timing, to the interference of instrumentation code, and to the storage and transfer of the collected data. To address this problem we propose a comprehensive software architecture, which instruments the application's executables, gather hierarchically the traces, and post-process them in order to feed simulation models. We designed it to be scalable, modular and extensible.