Computer Science Technical Reports
CS at VT

ScALPEL: A Scalable Adaptive Lightweight Performance Evaluation Library for application performance monitoring

Pyla, Hari and Ramesh, Bharath and Ribbens, Calvin J. and Varadarajan, Srinidhi (2009) ScALPEL: A Scalable Adaptive Lightweight Performance Evaluation Library for application performance monitoring. Technical Report TR-09-03, Computer Science, Virginia Tech.

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Abstract

As supercomputers continue to grow in scale and capabilities, it is becoming increasingly difficult to isolate processor and system level causes of performance degradation. Over the last several years, a significant number of performance analysis and monitoring tools have been built/proposed. However, these tools suffer from several important shortcomings, particularly in distributed environments. In this paper we present ScALPEL, a Scalable Adaptive Lightweight Performance Evaluation Library for application performance monitoring at the functional level. Our approach provides several distinct advantages. First, ScALPEL is portable across a wide variety of architectures, and its ability to selectively monitor functions presents low run-time overhead, enabling its use for large-scale production applications. Second, it is run-time configurable, enabling both dynamic selection of functions to profile as well as events of interest on a per function basis. Third, our approach is transparent in that it requires no source code modifications. Finally, ScALPEL is implemented as a pluggable unit by reusing existing performance monitoring frameworks such as Perfmon and PAPI and extending them to support both sequential and MPI applications.

Item Type:Departmental Technical Report
Keywords:Hardware performance counters, performance evaluation, parallel computing, high performance computing
Subjects:Computer Science > Parallel Computation
Computer Science > Distributed Computing
ID Code:1063
Deposited By:Pyla, Hari
Deposited On:02 March 2009