Visualizing network traffic to understand the performance of massively parallel simulations

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Publication Type pre-print
School or College College of Engineering
Department Computing, School of
Creator Pascucci, Valerio
Other Author Landge, Aaditya G.; Levine, Joshua A.; Bhatele, Abhinav; Isaacs, Katherine E.; Gamblin, Todd; Schulz, Martin; Langer, Steve H.; Bremer, Peer-Timo
Title Visualizing network traffic to understand the performance of massively parallel simulations
Date 2012-01-01
Description The performance of massively parallel applications is often heavily impacted by the cost of communication among compute nodes. However, determining how to best use the network is a formidable task, made challenging by the ever increasing size and complexity of modern supercomputers. This paper applies visualization techniques to aid parallel application developers in understanding the network activity by enabling a detailed exploration of the flow of packets through the hardware interconnect. In order to visualize this large and complex data, we employ two linked views of the hardware network. The first is a 2D view, that represents the network structure as one of several simplified planar projections. This view is designed to allow a user to easily identify trends and patterns in the network traffic. The second is a 3D view that augments the 2D view by preserving the physical network topology and providing a context that is familiar to the application developers. Using the massively parallel multi-physics code pF3D as a case study, we demonstrate that our tool provides valuable insight that we use to explain and optimize pF3D's performance on an IBM Blue Gene/P system.
Type Text
Publisher Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE)
Volume 18
Issue 12
First Page 2467
Last Page 2476
Dissertation Institution University of Utah
Language eng
Bibliographic Citation Landge, A. G., Levine, J. A., Bhatele, A., Isaacs, K. E., Gamblin, T., Schulz, M., Langer, S. H., Bremer, P.-T., & Pascucci, V. (2012). Visualizing network traffic to understand the performance of massively parallel simulations. IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics, 18(12), 6327252, 2467-76.
Rights Management (c) 2012 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. However, permission to reprint/republish this material for advertising or promotional purposes or for creating new collective works for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or to reuse any copyrighted component of this work in other works must be obtained from the IEEE.
Format Medium application/pdf
Format Extent 6,158,265 bytes
Identifier uspace,18029
ARK ark:/87278/s6ng58f8
Setname ir_uspace
ID 708208
Reference URL https://collections.lib.utah.edu/ark:/87278/s6ng58f8
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