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Analyzing time-dimension communication characterizations for representative scientific applications on supercomputer systems

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Abstract

Exascale computing is one of the major challenges of this decade, and several studies have shown that communications are becoming one of the bottlenecks for scaling parallel applications. The analysis on the characteristics of communications can effectively aid to improve the performance of scientific applications. In this paper, we focus on the statistical regularity in time-dimension communication characteristics for representative scientific applications on supercomputer systems, and then prove that the distribution of communication-event intervals has a power-law decay, which is common in scientific interests and human activities. We verify the distribution of communication-event intervals has really a power-law decay on the Tianhe-2 supercomputer, and also on the other six parallel systems with three different network topologies and two routing policies. In order to do a quantitative study on the power-law distribution, we exploit two groups of statistics: bursty vs. memory and periodicity vs. dispersion. Our results indicate that the communication events show a “strong-bursty and weak-memory” characteristic and the communication event intervals show the periodicity and the dispersion. Finally, our research provides an insight into the relationship between communication optimizations and time-dimension communication characteristics.

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Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank to the funding from the National Key Research and Development Program of China (2017YFB0202200), the Advanced Research Project of China (31511010203), Open Fund (201503-02) from State Key Laboratory of High Performance Computing, and Research Program of NUDT (ZK18-03-10).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. State Key Laboratory of High Performance Computing, College of Computer, National University of Defense Technology, Changsha, 410073, China

    Juan Chen, Wenhao Zhou, Yong Dong, Zhiyuan Wang, Chen Cui, Feihao Wu, Enqiang Zhou & Yuhua Tang

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  1. Juan Chen
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  8. Yuhua Tang
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Correspondence to Juan Chen or Yong Dong.

Additional information

Juan Chen received the PhD degree in the College of Computer from National University of Defense Technology, China in 2007. She is now an associate professor in the College of Computer at National University of Defense Technology, China. Her research interests focus on low-power software optimization methods in supercomputer systems, energy-aware high-performance computing interconnection network design, and parallel software algorithms.

Wenhao Zhou received the BS and MS degrees in the College of Computer from National University of Defense Technology, China in 2013 and 2015. His research interests focus on energy-aware HPC interconnection networks and parallel software algorithms.

Yong Dong received the PhD degree in the College of Computer from National University of Defense Technology, China in 2012. He is now an associate professor in the College of Computer at National University of Defense Technology, China. His research interests focus on supercomputer systems and storage systems.

Zhiyuan Wang received the PhD degree from the College of Computer, National University of Defense Technology in 2011. She is currently an assistant professor in the State Key Laboratory of High Performance Computing, National University of Defense Technology, China. Her research interests focus on parallel and distributed systems.

Chen Cui received the BS degree in the School of Electronics Engineering and Computer Science at Peking University, China in 2015. He received the MS degree from the College of Computer, National University of Defense Technology in 2017. His research interests focus on the large scale parallel numerical simulation and parallel software framework.

Feihao Wu received the BS degree in the School of Electronics Engineering and Computer Science at Harbin Institute of Technology, China in 2016 and now is a MS student at National University of Defense Technology. His research interests focus on the large scale parallel numerical simulation and energy efficiency computing.

Enqiang Zhou received his MS degree in Computer Department from National University of Defense Technology, China in 1998. He is currently a professor in National University of Defense Technology. His research interests include supercomputer systems and large scale parallel storage system.

Yuhua Tang received her BS and MS degrees in the College of Computer at National University of Defense Technology, China in 1983 and 1986, respectively. She is currently a professor in the State Key Laboratory of High Performance Computing, National University of Defense Technology. Her research interests include supercomputer architecture and core router’s design.

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Analyzing time-dimension communication characterizations for representative scientific applications on supercomputer systems

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Chen, J., Zhou, W., Dong, Y. et al. Analyzing time-dimension communication characterizations for representative scientific applications on supercomputer systems. Front. Comput. Sci. 13, 1228–1242 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11704-018-7239-1

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