Abstract:
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.