Graph visualization for the analysis of the structure and dynamics of extreme-scale supercomputers

Abstract

We are exploring the development and application of information visualization techniques for the analysis of new massively parallel supercomputer architectures. Modern supercomputers typically comprise very large clusters of commodity SMPs interconnected by possibly dense and often nonstandard networks. The scale, complexity, and inherent nonlocality of the structure and dynamics of this hardware, and the systems and applications distributed over it, challenge traditional analysis methods. As part of the 'a la carte team at Los Alamos National Laboratory, who are simulating these advanced architectures, we are exploring advanced visualization techniques and creating tools to provide intuitive exploration, discovery, and analysis of these simulations. This work complements existing and emerging algorithmic analysis tools. This paper gives background on the problem domain, a description of a prototypical computer architecture of interest (on the order of 10,000 processors connected by a quaternary fat-tree communications network), and a presentation of two classes of visualizations that clearly display the switch structure and the flow of information in the interconnecting network.