Advances in the TAU Performance System

Allen D. Malony, Sameer Shende, Robert Bell, Kai Li, Li Li, Nick Trebon
University of Oregon
{malony,sameer,bertie,likai,lili,ntrebon}@cs.uoregon.edu

Abstract:

To address the increasing complexity in parallel and distributed systems and software, advances in performance technology towards more robust tools and broader, more portable implementations are needed. In doing so, new challenges for performance instrumentation, measurement, analysis, and visualization arise to address evolving requirements for how performance phenomena is observed and how performance data is used. This paper presents recent advances in the TAU performance system in four areas where improvements in performance technology are important: instrumentation control, performance mapping, performance interaction and steering, and performance databases. In the area of instrumentation control, we are concerned with the removal of instrumentation in cases of high measurement overhead. Our approach applies rule-based analysis of performance data in an iterative instrumentation process. Work on performance mapping focuses on measuring performance with respect to dynamic calling paths when the static callgraph cannot be determined prior to execution. We describe an online performance data access, analysis, and visualization system that will form the basis of a large-scale performance interaction and steering system. Finally, we describe our approach to the management of performance data in a database framework that supports multi-experiment analysis.