SIM-SITU: A Framework for the Faithful Simulation of in situ Processing
Abstract
The amount of data generated by numerical simulations in various scientific domains led to a fundamental redesign
of how the analysis and visualization of simulation outputs are
performed. The throughput and capacity of storage subsystems
have not evolved as fast as the computing power in extreme-scale
supercomputers, making the classical post-hoc approach highly
inefficient. In situ processing has then emerged as a solution in
which simulation and data analysis/visualization are intertwined
for better performance and greater interactivity.
Determining the best allocation, i.e., how many resources to allocate to simulation and analysis respectively, mapping, i.e., where
and at which frequency to run the analysis/visualization, and data
transfer mode is a complex task whose performance assessment
is crucial to the efficient execution of in situ processing. However,
such a performance evaluation of different strategies usually
relies either on directly running them on the targeted execution
environments, which can rapidly become extremely time- and
resource-consuming, or on resorting to simplified models of the
components of an in situ application, which can lack of realism. In
both cases, the validity of the performance evaluation is limited.
In this paper, we present SIM-SITU, a framework for the
faithful performance evaluation of in situ processing strategies.
We designed SIM-SITU to reflect the typical features of in situ
processing systems. Thanks to its modular design, SIM-SITU
has the necessary flexibility to easily and faithfully evaluate
the behavior and performance of various allocation, mapping,
and data transfer strategies. We illustrate the capabilities of
SIM-SITU on a Molecular Dynamics use case. We study the
impact of different strategies on performance and show how users
can leverage SIM-SITU to determine interesting tradeoffs when
adding analysis/visualization components to their application.
Origin : Files produced by the author(s)