A case study in top-down performance estimation for a large-scale parallel application

This work presents a general methodology for estimating the performance of an HPC workload when running on a future hardware architecture. Further, it demonstrates the methodology by estimating the performance of a significant scientific application — the Gyrokinetic Toroidal Code (GTC) — when executing on Sun’s proposed next-generation petascale computer architecture. For GTC, we identify the important phases of the iteration and perform low-level analysis that includes instruction tracing and component simulations of processor and memory systems. Lowlevel analysis is complemented with scalability estimates based on modeling MPI, OpenMP and I/O activity in the code. The work’s approach permits accurate end-to-end performance projections from the microarchitecture level to the petascale. Categories and Subject Descriptors C.4 [Performance of sys

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2006
• Where: PPOPP
• Authors: Ilya Sharapov, Robert Kroeger, Guy Delamarter, Razvan Cheveresan, Matthew Ramsay
• Keywords: Distributed And Parallel Computing, End-to-end Performance Projections, Gyrokinetic Toroidal Code, Performance, PPOPP 2006