Automated Calibration of a Simulator of MPI Application Executions

The traditional approach for assessing the performance of scientific applications on HPC platforms consists in executing these applications on these platforms. But conducting these real-world experiments comes with several difficulties. Besides being often time-, labor-, and resource-intensive, experiments are limited to application and platform configurations at hand, thus precluding the exploration of "what if?" scenarios. A way to resolve these difficulties is to resort to simulation. The main concern, then, is that of simulation accuracy. For a simulation to be accurate, the parameters that define the behavior of the simulation models can be calibrated with respect to ground-truth executions. Simulation calibration, in the current state of the art, relies, at best, on labor-intensive manual procedures. We propose an automated simulation calibration approach, and apply this approach to the specific context of the simulation of MPI applications on leadership class HPC platforms. This poster will motivate the development of this approach and detail our methodology and results.