Reducing Parallel Program Simulation Complexity by Static Analysis

In this paper we present a novel approach, based on the integration of static program analysis and simulation techniques, for the performance prediction of message passing programs. PS, a simulator of PVM applications developed in the last years by our research group, is fed with traces collected by executing the parallel program to be analyzed in quasi-concurrent mode on a single workstation. Since this process is typically a non negligible part of the simulation complexity, we have devised a technique based on static analysis and code restructuring for significantly speeding up the trace generation. We show how, by statically analyzing and restructuring the program, it is possible to obtain a simplified code (shrinked code) to be run for collecting a reduced version of the traces.