Award year: 2024
Category: Other Award
Awarding organization: Supercomputing Conference SC24
In 2024, the poster, “DisCostiC: Simulating MPI Applications Without Executing Code” (co-authored by Ayesha Afzal, Georg Hager and Gerhard Wellein), was recognized by the SC Posters Committee for its strong research content, clarity of presentation, innovation, and potential impact and was selected as a Best Research Poster Award Finalist at the Supercomputing Conference (SC24).
In the poster, Authors present the cross-architecture parallel simulation framework DisCostiC (Distributed Cost in Clusters). It predicts the performance of real or hypothetical, massively parallel MPI(+X) programs on current and future supercomputer systems. The novelty of DisCostiC is that it employs analytical, first-principle performance models at full scale, including cores, chips, nodes, and networks, while being aware of bottlenecks such as memory bandwidth. DisCostiC uses application skeletons in a Domain-Specific Embedded Language (DSEL), which encodes inter-process dependencies and any number of system and code properties, enabling flexible design space exploration. As a consequence of the model-based design, DisCostiC requires much less time and resources than traditional simulators because the application code is never actually run. This is in contrast to state-of-the-art solutions, which are based on trace data and/or simulated code execution and may thus need considerable resources. The resulting traces can be visualized using Chromium Browser, ITAC, or Vampir.
URL: https://sc24.supercomputing.org/proceedings/poster/poster_pages/post167.html