Characterization of MPI Usage on a Production Supercomputer

Authors: Sudheer Chunduri (Argonne National Laboratory), Scott Parker (Argonne National Laboratory), Pavan Balaji (Argonne National Laboratory), Kevin Harms (Argonne National Laboratory), Kalyan Kumaran (Argonne National Laboratory)

Abstract: MPI is the most prominent programming model used in scientific computing today. Despite it's importance, however, how scientific applications use it in production is not very well understood due to the lack of low overhead profiling tools. We used a lightweight profiling tool, called autoperf, to log the MPI usage characteristics of production applications on a large supercomputing system (Mira) and its corresponding development system (Cetus). Autoperf limits the amount of information that it records in order to keep the overhead to a minimum while still storing enough data to derive useful insights. MPI usage statistics have been collected for over 100K jobs that were run within a 2-year period and are analyzed. The analysis of this data is intended as a mechanism to provide useful insights for MPI developers and network hardware developers for their next generation of improvements, and for supercomputing center operators for their next system procurements.


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