next up previous
Next: Acknowledgements Up: Compensation of Measurement Overhead Previous: Experimental Results


Conclusion

Most parallel performance measurement tools ignore the overhead incurred by their use. Tool developers attempt to build the measurement system as efficiently as possible, but do not attempt to quantify the intrusion other than as a percentage slowdown in execution time. Our earlier work on overhead compensation in parallel profiling showed that the intrusion effects on the performance of events local to a process can be corrected (16). In this paper, we model how local overheads affect performance delays across the computation and implement these parallel models in the context of MPI message passing and demonstrate that parallel overhead compensation can be effective in practice to improve measurement error. The engineering feats to accomplish the implementation are novel. In particular, the approach to delay piggybacking can be generalized to other problems where additional information must be sent with messages.

It is important to understand that we are not saying that the performance profile we produce with overhead compensation represents the actual performance profile of an uninstrumented execution. The performance uncertainty principle (13) implies that the accuracy of performance data is inversely correlated with the degree of performance instrumentation. Our goal is to improve the tradeoff, that is, to improve the accuracy of the performance being measured during profiling. What we are saying in this paper is that the performance profiles produced with our models for performance overhead compensation will be more accurate than performance results produced without compensation.


next up previous
Next: Acknowledgements Up: Compensation of Measurement Overhead Previous: Experimental Results
Scott Biersdorff 2007-02-02