A tool for selecting the right target machine for parallel scientific applications

Analyzing and predicting performance in parallel applications is a great challenge for scientific programmers due to its complexity. Analyzing parallel application behavior is not a trivial process and it requires spending a large amount of time and effort to understand the behavior of the application algorithms during execution. We have developed PAS2P toolkit from PAS2P methodology. This methodology strives to characterize the behavior of MPI applications to identify and extract representative phases and create a signature, which will be used to analyze the application behavior and predict its execution time in different target systems. Applying this methodology is a non-trivial process for users, for this reason we have developed the proposal toolkit, which allows users to make the whole process, from creating a signature to executing it on target systems, in user-space in an easy and fully automatic way. PAS2P toolkit has been validated, making clear the advantages of the signature, with its execution time being much lower than the whole application execution time (around 7% of the total execution time), with a high quality prediction of around 96%.