ScalaBenchGen: Auto-Generation of Communication Benchmarks Traces

Benchmarks are essential for evaluating HPC hardware and software for petascale machines and beyond. But benchmark creation is a tedious manual process. As a result, benchmarks tend to lag behind the development of complex scientific codes. This work contributes an automated approach to the creation of communication benchmarks. Given an MPI application, we utilize Scala Trace, a loss less and scalable framework to trace communication operations and execution time while abstracting away the computations. A single trace file that reflects the behavior of all nodes is subsequently expanded to C source code by a novel code generator. This resulting benchmark code is compact, portable, human-readable, and accurately reflects the original application´s communication characteristics and runtime characteristics. Experimental results demonstrate that generated source code of benchmarks preserves both the communication patterns and the wall clock-time behavior of the original application. Such automatically generated benchmarks not only shorten the transition from application development to benchmark extraction but also facilitate code obfuscation, which is essential for benchmark extraction from commercial and restricted applications.