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

Omar Aaziz, Courtenay Vaughan, Jonathan Cook, Jeanine Cook, Jeffrey Kuehn and David Richards

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.