The International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage, and Analysis
The International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage, and Analysis
Workshop: PMBS23: The 14th International Workshop on Performance Modeling, Benchmarking, and Simulation of High-Performance Computer Systems
Authors: Ayesha Afzal and Georg Hager (Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg Germany, Erlangen National High Performance Computing Center (NHR@FAU)) and Gerhard Wellein (Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg Germany, Department of Computer Science)
Abstract: A parallel program together with the parallel hardware it runs on is not only a vehicle to solve numerical problems, it is also a complex system with interesting dynamical behavior: resynchronization and desynchronization of parallel processes, propagating phases of idleness, and the peculiar effects of noise and system topology are just a few examples. We propose a physical oscillator model (POM) to describe the dynamics of interacting parallel processes. A process with its regular compute-communicate cycles is modeled as an oscillator which is coupled to other oscillators (processes) via an interaction potential. Instead of a simple all-to-all connectivity as in the standard well-known Kuramoto model, we employ a sparse topology matrix mapping the communication structure of the parallel program onto the oscillator setup. We show that the POM with appropriate potentials can mimic the propagation of delays and the synchronization and desynchronization behavior of scalable and bottlenecked parallel programs, respectively.