TINS: A Task-Based Dynamic Helper Core Strategy for In Situ Analytics

International audienceThe in situ paradigm proposes to co-locate simulation and analytics on the same compute node to analyze data while still resident in the compute node memory, hence reducing the need for post-processing methods. A standard approach that proved efficient for sharing resources on each node consists in running the analytics processes on a set of dedicated cores, called helper cores, to isolate them from the simulation processes. Simulation and analytics thus run concurrently with limited interference. In this paper we show that the performance can be improved through a dynamic helper core strategy. We rely on a work stealing scheduler to implement TINS, a task-based in situ framework with an on-demand analytics isolation. The helper cores are dedicated to analytics only when analytics tasks are available. Otherwise the helper cores join the other cores for processing simulation tasks. TINS relies on the Intel R TBB library. Experiments on up to 14,336 cores run a set of representative analytics parallelized with TBB coupled with the hybrid MPI+TBB ExaStamp molecular dynamics code. TINS shows up to 40% performance improvement over various other approaches including the standard helper core