A scalable synthetic traffic model of Graph500 for computer networks analysis

Abstract

The Graph500 benchmark attempts to steer the design of High-Performance Computing systems to maximize the performance under memory-constricted application workloads. A realistic simulation of such benchmarks for architectural research is challenging due to size and detail limitations. By contrast, synthetic traffic workloads constitute one of the least resource-consuming methods to evaluate the performance. In this work, we provide a simulation tool for network architects that need to evaluate the suitability of their interconnect for BigData applications. Our development is a low computation- and memory-demanding synthetic traffic model that emulates the behavior of the Graph500 communications and is publicly available in an open-source network simulator. The characterization of network traffic is inferred from a profile of several executions of the benchmark with different input parameters. We verify the validity of the equations in our model against an execution of the benchmark with a different set of parameters. Furthermore, we identify the impact of the node computation capabilities and network characteristics in the execution time of the model in a Dragonfly network.