A method for prediction dynamic characteristics of parallel programs based on static analysis

In this paper, we consider the problem of prediction of parallel program dynamic characteristics, like execution time, count of floating-point operations, energy consumption, count of memory accesses and others. Prediction of dynamic characteristics allows solving many problems, related to design of new architectures, selection of the most suitable configurations of multiprocessor systems for solving specific problems, porting applications to new systems, task flow planning and more. The task of predicting characteristics is being actively investigated. Increasing complexity of the architectures of modern high-performance systems requires the development of new methods for solving the prediction problem. The article provides an overview of the existing approaches and software for predicting dynamic characteristics and proposes an approach based on a static analysis of the source code of a parallel application. Based on the text of the parallel program, the formal description of the target computing platform and the launch parameters, a method is implemented that allows predicting the operating time, the number of floating-point operations, number of memory accesses, and other characteristics of the parallel application. The applicability of the proposed approach is demonstrated by solving the test 3-dimensional numerical simulation problem on a multiprocessor cluster based on IBM Power8 processors.