Simulation-Based Performance Prediction of HPC Applications: A Case Study of HPL

Abstract: We propose a simulation-based approach for performance modeling of parallel applications on high-performance computing platforms. Our approach enables full-system performance modeling: (1) the hardware platform is represented by an abstract yet high-fidelity model; (2) the computation and communication components are simulated at a functional level, where the simulator allows the use of the components native interface; this results in a (3) fast and accurate simulation of full HPC applications with minimal modifications to the application source code. This hardware/software hybrid modeling methodology allows for low overhead, fast, and accurate exascale simulation and can be easily carried out on a standard client platform (desktop or laptop). We demonstrate the capability and scalability of our approach with High Performance LINPACK (HPL), the benchmark used to rank supercomputers in the TOP500 list. Our results show that our modeling approach can accurately and efficiently predict the performance of HPL at the scale of the TOP500 list supercomputers. For instance, the simulation of HPL on Frontera takes less than five hours with an error rate of four percent.