Paper Info
Title
Fit Fly: A Case Study on Interconnect Innovation through Parallel Simulation.
Abstract
To meet the demand for exascale-level performance from high-performance computing (HPC) interconnects, many system architects are turning to simulation results for accurate and reliable predictions of the performance of prospective technologies. Testing full-scale networks with a variety of benchmarking tools, including synthetic workloads and application traces, can give crucial insight into what ideas are most promising without needing to physically construct a test network. While flexible, however, this approach is extremely compute time intensive. We address this time complexity challenge through the use of large-scale, optimistic parallel simulation that ultimately leads to faster HPC network architecture innovations. In this paper we demonstrate this innovation capability through a real-world network design case study. Specifically, we have simulated and compared four extreme-scale interconnects: Dragonfly, Megafly, Slim Fly, and a new dual-rail-dual-plane variation of the Slim Fly network topology. We present this new variant of Slim Fly, dubbed Fit Fly, to show how interconnect innovation and evaluation---beyond what is possible through analytic methods---can be achieved through parallel simulation. We validate and compare the model with various network designs using the CODES interconnect simulation framework. By running large-scale simulations in a parallel environment, we are able to quickly generate reliable performance results that can help network designers break ground on the next generation of high-performance network designs.
Year
DOI
Venue
2019
10.1145/3316480.3325515
SIGSIM-PADS '19: SIGSIM Principles of Advanced Discrete Simulation Chicago IL USA June, 2019
Keywords
Field
DocType
Interconnection Networks, High Performance Computing, Parallel Discrete Event Simulation, Modeling
Parallel simulation,Computer science,Parallel computing,Interconnection,Distributed computing
Conference
ISBN
Citations 
PageRank 
978-1-4503-6723-3
0
0.34
References 
Authors
0
4
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
neil mcglohon161.51
Noah Wolfe2143.32
Mubarak Misbah313414.22
Christopher D. Carothers4102261.60