CommAnalyzer: automated estimation of communication cost and scalability on HPC clusters from sequential code.

To deliver scalable performance to large-scale scientific and data analytic applications, HPC cluster architectures adopt the distributed-memory model. The performance and scalability of parallel applications on such systems are limited by the communication cost across compute nodes. Therefore, projecting the minimum communication cost and maximum scalability of the user applications plays a critical role in assessing the benefits of porting these applications to HPC clusters as well as developing efficient distributed-memory implementations. Unfortunately, this task is extremely challenging for end users, as it requires comprehensive knowledge of the target application and hardware architecture and demands significant effort and time for manual system analysis. To streamline the process of porting user applications to HPC clusters, this paper presents CommAnalyzer, an automated framework for estimating the communication cost on distributed-memory models from sequential code. CommAnalyzer uses novel dynamic program analyses and graph algorithms to capture the inherent flow of program values (information) in sequential code to estimate the communication when this code is ported to HPC clusters. Therefore, CommAnalyzer makes it possible to project the efficiency/scalability upper-bound (i.e., Roofline) of the effective distributed-memory implementation before even developing one. The experiments with real-world, regular and irregular HPC applications demonstrate the utility of CommAnalyzer in estimating the minimum communication of sequential applications on HPC clusters. In addition, the optimized MPI+X implementations achieve more than 92% of the efficiency upper-bound across the different workloads.