Predicting Execution Readiness of MPI Binaries with FEAM, a Framework for Efficient Application Migration

As computing resources have become ubiquitous, computational research initiatives have spread into a wider variety of disciplines. With the variety of computing environments dramatically expanded, using available compute resources can be a much more complicated proposition. Additionally, users in disciplines that are not traditionally compute-heavy may not have experience with migrating an application from one computing environment to another. Thus, while more and faster resources should allow for more and better research to be carried out, the increase in resources can just as easily stymie progress. An ideal solution would enable computations to run on any available compute resource with minimal interaction from the user and would run a version of the application tuned for that particular site. In this work, we focus on the first goal. This step alone dramatically improves the ability of researchers to take advantage of the variety of computing resources available to them and, as a result, carry out more and better research. The work presented in this paper specifically focuses on increasing the ease-of-use of high performance computing clusters for running parallel computations coded using the MPI standard. We present methods that determine whether an HPC site is a good fit for running an MPI binary. We present a Linux-based implementation of our methods called FEAM (a Framework for Efficient Application Migration). FEAM predicts execution readiness, resolves missing shared libraries, and composes site-specific configurations. We show that FEAM is more than 90% accurate at predicting execution readiness of MPI application binaries from the NAS Parallel and SPEC MPI2007 benchmark suites. We also show that by automatically resolving shared libraries requirements, FEAM is able to increase the number of successful executions by 41%.