VEF Traces: A Framework for Modelling MPI Traffic in Interconnection Network Simulators

Abstract

Simulation is often used to evaluate the behaviour and measure the performance of computing systems. Specifically, in high-performance interconnection networks, the simulation has been extensively considered to verify the behaviour of the network itself and to evaluate its performance. In this context, network simulation must be fed with network traffic, also referred to as network workload, whose nature has been traditionally synthetic. These workloads can be used for the purpose of driving studies on network performance, but often such workloads are not accurate enough if a realistic evaluation is pursued. For this reason, other non-synthetic workloads have gained popularity over last decades since they are best to capture the realistic behaviour of existing applications. In this paper, we present the VEF traces framework, a self-related trace model, and all their associated tools. The main novelty of this framework is that, unlike existing ones, it does not provide a network simulation framework, but only offers an MPI task simulation framework, which allows one to use the MPI-based network traffic by any third-party network simulator, since this framework does not depend on any specific simulation platform.