Tag: Performance Optimization

Scalasca is a software tool that supports the performance optimization of parallel programs by measuring and analyzing their runtime behavior. The analysis identifies potential performance bottlenecks – in particular those concerning communication and synchronization – and offers guidance in exploring their causes.

Paraver is a very flexible data browser that is part of the CEPBA-Tools toolkit. Its analysis power is based on two main pillars. First, its trace format has no semantics; extending the tool to support new performance data or new programming models requires no changes to the visualizer, just to capture such data in a Paraver trace. The second pillar is that the metrics are not hardwired on the tool but programmed. To compute them, the tool offers a large set of time functions, a filter module, and a mechanism to combine two time lines. This approach allows displaying a huge number of metrics with the available data. To capture the experts knowledge, any view or set of views can be saved as a Paraver configuration file. After that, re-computing the view with new data is as simple as loading the saved file. The tool has been demonstrated to be very useful for performance analysis studies, giving much more details about the applications behaviour than most performance tools. Some Paraver features are the support for:

• Detailed quantitative analysis of program performance
• Concurrent comparative analysis of several traces
• Customizable semantics of the visualized information
• Cooperative work, sharing views of the tracefile
• Building of derived metrics

Extrae profiling tool, developed by BSC, can very quickly produce very large trace files, which can take several minutes to load into Paraver, the tool used to view the traces. These trace files can be kept to a more manageable size by using Extrae’s API to turn the tracing on and off as needed. For example, the user might only want to record data for two or three time steps. This API was previously only available for codes developed in C, C++ and Fortran but now it also supports Python codes using MPI.

Extra-P is an automatic performance-modeling tool that supports the user in the identification of scalability bugs. A scalability bug is a part of the program whose scaling behavior is unintentionally poor, that is, much worse than expected. A performance model is a formula that expresses a performance metric of interest such as execution time or energy consumption as a function of one or more execution parameters such as the size of the input problem or the number of processors.