Preliminary Evaluation of a Parallel Trace Replay Tool for HPC Network Simulations

Abstract. This paper presents a preliminary evaluation of TraceR, a trace replay tool built upon the ROSS-based CODES simulation frame-work. TraceR can be used for predicting network performance and un-derstanding network behavior by simulating messaging on interconnec-tion networks. It addresses two major shortcomings in current network simulators. First, it enables fast and scalable simulations of large-scale supercomputer networks. Second, it can simulate production HPC appli-cations using BigSim’s emulation framework. In addition to introducing TraceR, this paper studies the impact of input parameters on simula-tion performance. We also compare TraceR with other network sim-ulators such as SST and BigSim, and demonstrate its scalability using various case studies.