Abstract:
With production HPC systems offering limited opportunities for studying the design of HPC systems, modeling and simulation are becoming popular choices for HPC design space exploration. In particular, parallel discrete-event simulation (PDES) can be used in a number of ways to answer "what-if" design questions. In this talk, we have focused on applying PDES to HPC interconnects, which are a key determinant of application performance. We will describe our experiences of using CODES discrete-event simulation framework to answer three questions. First, when using a dragonfly network, what is the impact of communication interference, job and data placement policies on application performance? Second, what insights does PDES give us into modern interconnect architectures such as dragonfly, fat tree, slim fly and torus networks? Third, how can PDES be used to assess communication algorithms and the impact of network routing algorithms? The talk will conclude by identifying opportunities through which simulation can assist application users and HPC centers to carry out effective design space exploration.

Bio:
Speaker Bio: Misbah Mubarak is a Postdoctoral Researcher in the Mathematics and Computer Science Division at Argonne National Laboratory. Her research focus is modeling and simulation, high performance networks and data-intensive computing. Misbah received her PhD and Masters in computer science from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) in 2015 and 2011 respectively. She also has experience working at CERN, Switzerland and Teradata Corporation. She is the recipient of US Fulbright scholarship and ACM SIGSIM PADS PhD colloquium award. She has served as a technical program committee member for numerous international conferences and workshops and a peer reviewer for several scientific journals.