Scaling to a million cores and beyond: Using light-weight simulation to understand the challenges ahead on the road to exascale

As supercomputers scale to 1000 PFlop/s over the next decade, investigating the performance of parallel applications at scale on future architectures and the performance impact of different architecture choices for high-performance computing (HPC) hardware/software co-design is crucial. This paper summarizes recent efforts in designing and implementing a novel HPC hardware/software co-design toolkit. The presented Extreme-scale Simulator (xSim) permits running an HPC application in a controlled environment with millions of concurrent execution threads while observing its performance in a simulated extreme-scale HPC system using architectural models and virtual timing. This paper demonstrates the capabilities and usefulness of the xSim performance investigation toolkit, such as its scalability to 227 simulated Message Passing Interface (MPI) ranks on 960 real processor cores, the capability to evaluate the performance of different MPI collective communication algorithms, and the ability to evaluate the performance of a basic Monte Carlo application with different architectural parameters. Simulation of different future high-performance computing architectures at scale.Demonstrates scalability to 134,217,728 simulated MPI ranks on 960 real cores.Evaluates MPI collective communication performance on 2,097,152 simulated ranks.Estimates the performance of a Monte Carlo solver on 16,777,216 simulated ranks.