ELASTIC: A Large Scale Dynamic Tuning Environment

Abstract

The spectacular growth in the number of cores in current supercomputers poses design challenges for the development of performance analysis and tuning tools. To be effective, such analysis and tuning tools must be scalable and be able to manage the dynamic behaviour of parallel applications. In this work, we present ELASTIC, an environment for dynamic tuning of large-scale parallel applications. To be scalable, the architecture of ELASTIC takes the form of a hierarchical tuning network of nodes that perform a distributed analysis and tuning process. Moreover, the tuning network topology can be configured to adapt itself to the size of the parallel application. To guide the dynamic tuning process, ELASTIC supports a plugin architecture. These plugins, called ELASTIC packages, allow the integration of different tuning strategies into ELASTIC. We also present experimental tests conducted using ELASTIC, showing its effectiveness to improve the performance of large-scale parallel applications.