Logicalization of communication traces from parallel execution

Communication traces are integral to performance modeling and analysis of parallel programs. However, execution on a large number of nodes results in a large trace volume that is cumbersome and expensive to analyze. This paper presents an automatic framework to convert all process traces corresponding to the parallel execution of an SPMD MPI program into a single logical trace. First, the application communication matrix is generated from process traces. Next, topology identification is performed based on the underlying communication structure and independent of the way ranks (or numbers) are assigned to processes. Finally, message exchanges between physical processes are converted into logical message exchanges that represent similar message exchanges across all processes, resulting in a trace volume reduction approximately equal to the number of processes executing the application. This logicalization framework has been implemented and the results report on its performance and effectiveness.