Towards a common metamodel for traces of high performance computing systems to enable software analysis tasks

There exist several tools for analyzing traces generated from HPC (High Performance Computing) applications, used by software engineers for debugging and other maintenance tasks. These tools, however, use different formats to represent HPC traces, which hinders interoperability and data exchange. At the present time, there is no standard metamodel that represents HPC trace concepts and their relations. In this paper, we argue that the lack of a common metamodel is a serious impediment for effective analysis for this class of software systems. We aim to fill this void by presenting MTF2 (MPI Trace Format2)-a metamodel for representing HPC system traces. MTF2 is built with expressiveness and scalability in mind. Scalability, an important requirement when working with large traces, is achieved by adopting graph theory concepts to compact large traces. We show through a case study that a trace represented in MTF2 can be in average 49% smaller than a trace represented in a format that does not consider compaction.