Scalable Behavioral Emulation of Extreme-Scale Systems Using Structural Simulation Toolkit
Ajay Ramaswamy, Nalini Kumar, Aravind Neelakantan, Herman X. Lam, Greg Stitt · 2018
With extremely large design spaces for algorithm and architecture to be explored, there is a need for fast and scalable performance modeling tools for preparing HPC application codes. Behavioral Emulation (BE) is a recent coarse-grained modeling and simulation methodology that has been proposed to solve this co-design problem. In this paper, we introduce a distributed parallel simulation library for Behavioral Emulation called BE-SST, integrated into the Structural Simulation Toolkit (SST). BE-SST provides simple interfaces and framework for development of coarse-grained BE models which can be extended to model new notional architectures. BE-SST also supports Monte Carlo simulations to generate meaningful distributions and summary statistics rather than a single datum for performance. In this paper, we present BE-SST simulations of two existing large DOE machines (Vulcan and Titan), which have been validated against actual testbed measurements and showed 5-10% error. These validated system models (up to 128k cores) are used to make blind predictions of application performance on systems larger than the current machines (up to 512k cores) - a crucial simulator feature for design-space exploration of notional systems. We further studied BE-SST in terms of scalability and performance, simulating up to a million cores, with BE-SST running on more than 2k parallel processes. BE-SST shows good scalability with a linear increase in memory usage and simulation time with increase in simulated system size, and a peak speedup of 7x over single process simulation. With ease of use and good scaling, we assert that BE-SST can significantly speed up design-space exploration.