Performance visualisation in a portable parallel programming environment

Glendinning, I., Getov, V.S., Hellberg, S.A., Hockney, R.W. and Pritchard, D.J. (1992) Performance visualisation in a portable parallel programming environment. Kotsis, G. and Haring, G. (eds.) Workshop on Monitoring and Visualisation in Parallel Processing Systems.

Abstract

In order to obtain the highest possible performance from programs running on massively parallel machines it is essential to identify precisely where and when computational resources are consumed during their execution. A number of performance visualisation tools have evolved to meet this need for particular systems but they are often not portable to other machines. We regard portability as crucial to the widespread acceptance and use of such tools, and have investigated several approaches to achieving it. Each approach has been based on the public domain ParaGraph tool, which enables trace data collected during a program's execution to be viewed from various different visual perspectives. One approach is for programs to use the portable instrumented communication library PICL, which directly generates trace data in the appropriate format. Alternatively, trace files produced by applications using other libraries can be converted into ParaGraph format using trace filter programs. In this paper we report on an implementation of PICL for transputers and on trace filters we developed for the PARMACS and Express libraries. We also describe ongoing work within the PPPE Esprit project to integrate ParaGraph into a portable parallel programming environment based on the PCTE portable common tool environment.

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