Yanxiang He

Bio: Yanxiang He is an academic researcher from Wuhan University. The author has contributed to research in topics: Matching (statistics) & Message Passing Interface. The author has an hindex of 1, co-authored 1 publications receiving 2 citations.

MPACP: An Approach for Automatic Matching of Parallel Application Communication Patterns

Abstract: Current trends in HPC (high performance computing) suggest that clusters will soon consist with hundreds, if not thousands, processors and the size of current scientific problems becomes much larger than before. Many researchers have predicted that the communication among these processors has dominated the execution time of the scientific parallel applications. Users will need well understanding on communication patterns among scientific parallel applications and their similarities so that users benefit not only from cost saving on constructing the running environment for these applications but also from obtaining better performance. In this paper, we address the communication pattern matching, and focus on point-to-point communication, which is primarily utilized (over 90% all MPI (message passing interface) calls) in most MPI codes and has much more impact on the communication performance than collective communication does. In this work, our contribution is that we propose a new approach MPACP (matching of parallel application communication patterns) to automate the analysis of the similarity between two parallel applications and provide a reliable report which will help users or developers understand the similarity among communication patterns of parallel applications. Furthermore, experimental results demonstrate the effective performance of our scheme in terms of the automatic matching of parallel application communication patterns.

Fine-Grained Analysis of Communication Similarity between Real and Proxy Applications

Abstract: In this work we investigate the dynamic communication behavior of parent and proxy applications, and investigate whether or not the dynamic communication behavior of the proxy matches that of its respective parent application. The idea of proxy applications is that they should match their parent well, and should exercise the hardware and perform similarly, so that from them lessons can be learned about how the HPC system and the application can best be utilized. We show here that some proxy/parent pairs do not need the extra detail of dynamic behavior analysis, while others can benefit from it, and through this we also identified a parent/proxy mismatch and improved the proxy application.

Exploring and Quantifying How Communication Behaviors in Proxies Relate to Real Applications

Abstract: Proxy applications, or proxies, are simple applications meant to exercise systems in a way that mimics real applications (their parents). However, characterizing the relationship between the behavior of parent and proxy applications is not an easy task. In prior work [1], we presented a data-driven methodology to characterize the relationship between parent and proxy applications based on collecting runtime data from both and then using data analytics to find their correspondence or divergence. We showed that it worked well for hardware counter data, but our initial attempt using MPI function data was less satisfactory. In this paper, we present an exploratory effort at making an improved quantification of the correspondence of communication behavior for proxies and their respective parent applications. We present experimental evidence of positive results using four proxy applications from the current ECP Proxy Application Suite and their corresponding parent applications (in the ECP application portfolio). Results show that each proxy analyzed is representative of its parent with respect to communication data. In conjunction with our method presented in [1] (correspondence between computation and memory behavior), we get a strong understanding of how well a proxy predicts the comprehensive performance of its parent.