DFTracer: An Analysis-Friendly Data Flow Tracer for AI-Driven Workflows

An analysis-friendly data-flow tracer for AI-driven workflows, developed at LLNL.

Modern HPC workflows involve intricate coupling of simulation, data analytics, and artificial intelligence (AI) applications to improve time to scientific insight. These workflows require a cohesive set of performance analysis tools to provide a comprehensive understanding of data exchange patterns in HPC systems. However, current tools are not designed to work with an AI-based I/O software stack that requires tracing at multiple levels of the application. To this end, we developed a data flow tracer called DFTracer to capture data-centric events from workflows and the I/O stack to build a detailed understanding of the data exchange within AI-driven workflows. DFTracer has the following three novel features, including a unified interface to capture trace data from different layers in the software stack, a trace format that is analysis-friendly and optimized to support efficiently loading multi-million events in a few seconds, and the capability to tag events with workflow-specific context to perform domain-centric data flow analysis for workflows. Additionally, we demonstrate that DFTracer has a 1.44x smaller runtime overhead and 1.3-7.1x smaller trace size than state-of-the-art tracing tools such as Score-P, Recorder, and Darshan. Moreover, with AI-driven workflows, Score-P, Recorder, and Darshan cannot find I/O accesses from dynamically spawned processes, and their load performance of 100M events is three orders of magnitude slower than DFTracer. In conclusion, we demonstrate that DFTracer can capture multi-level performance data, including contextual event tagging with a low overhead of 1-5% from AI-driven workflows such as MuMMI and Microsoft's Megatron Deepspeed running on large-scale HPC systems.