The interconnection network is a key component of Supercomputers and Data centers, and its design must cope with the increasing communication demands of current applications and services; otherwise, it may become a system bottleneck. The most challenging network design issues are the topology, routing algorithm, flow control, and power efficiency. However, even the most efficient interconnection networks may suffer severe performance degradation due to congestion, especially under specific network traffic patterns generated by communication operations in high-performance computing~(HPC), deep learning training, or online data-intensive services. In this context, characterizing and modeling these communication operations and the network traffic patterns they generate is a fundamental challenge for studying their impact on network performance. This paper presents a methodology, based primarily on the VEF Traces framework, to characterize, model, and simulate the communication patterns of representative computing- and data-intensive applications. More precisely, we have extended the VEF traces framework with tools that enable us to characterize network congestion, either directly from VEF traces or via simulations. We have analyzed a set of VEF traces obtained from runs of NEST, GROMACS, LAMMPS, and PATMOS on several Supercomputers. In these studies, we identify potential congestion scenarios that arise in realistic network configurations when certain collective operations are performed.

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