MPSS: a Simulator of Message-Passing Applications for Heterogeneous Computing Environments
Rocco Aversa, Nicola Mazzocca, Luigi Romano, Umberto Villano · 1996
This paper presents the design of Message-Passing System Simulator (MPSS), a tool for performance prediction analysis of parallel applications based upon the message-passing paradigm and running in heterogeneous environments. MPSS enables the developer to evaluate the performance a given application would show on different real or hypothetical hardware configurations, starting from the trace of a real run. The trace may be obtained by executing the application on almost every possible hardware configuration, possibly less powerful than the target one, or even on a single processor machine. To ensure the portability of MPSS to the most common programming environments, off-line tools for performing conversion from the format of some widely-used monitoring utilities to MPSS format have been developed. After a discussion of the rationale and structure of MPSS, an existing implementation for the PVM environment is shown as an example. 1. Introduction As is well known, the performance of a...