MPI-SIM: Using Parallel Simulation To Evaluate MPI Programs
Sundeep Prakash, Rajive L. Bagrodia · 1998
This paper describes the design and implementation of MPI-SIM, a library for the execution driven parallel simulation of MPI programs. MPI-LITE, a portable library that supports multithreaded MPI is also described. MPI-SIM, which is built on top of MPI-LITE, can be used to predict the performance of existing MPI programs as a function of architectural characteristics including number of processors and message communication latencies. The simulation models can be executed sequentially or in parallel. Parallel executions of MPI-SIM models are synchronized using a set of asynchronous conservative protocols. MPI-SIM reduces synchronization overheads by exploiting the communication characteristics of the program that it simulates. The paper presents validation and performance results from the use of MPI-SIM to simulate applications from the NAS Parallel Benchmark suite. Using the techniques described in this paper, we were able to reduce the number of synchronizations in the parallel simula...