CommAnalyzer: Automated Estimation of Communication Cost on HPC Clusters Using Sequential Code

Abstract

MPI+X is the de facto standard for programming applications on HPC clusters. The performance and scalability on such systems is limited by the communication cost on different number of processes and compute nodes. Therefore, the current communication analysis tools play a critical role in the design and development of HPC applications. However, these tools require the availability of the MPI implementation, which might not exist in the early stage of the development process due to the parallel programming effort and time. This paper presents CommAnalyzer, an automated tool for communication model generation from a sequential code. CommAnalyzer uses novel compiler analysis techniques and graph algorithms to capture the inherent communication characteristics of sequential applications, and to estimate their communication cost on HPC systems. The experiments with real-world, regular and irregular scientific applications demonstrate the utility of CommAnalyzer in estimating the communication cost on HPC clusters with more than 95% accuracy on average.