Tools for parallel and distributed computing

Abstract

Performance engineering of parallel and distributed applications is a complex task that iterates through various phases, ranging from modeling and prediction, to performance measurement, experiment management, data collection, and bottleneck analysis. There is no evidence so far that all of these phases should/can be integrated in a single monolithic tool. Moreover, the emergence of Cloud computing as well as established Grid infrastructures as a wide-area platform for high-performance computing raises the idea to provide tools as interacting Web services that share resources, support interoperability among different users and tools, and most important provide omni-present services over Grid or Cloud infrastructures. We have developed the ASKALON tool set to support performance-oriented development of parallel and distributed applications. ASKALON comprises four tools, coherently integrated into a Web service-based distributed architecture. SCALEA is a performance instrumentation, measurement, and analysis tool of parallel and distributed applications. ZENTURIO is a general purpose experiment management tool with advanced support for multi-experiment performance analysis and parameter studies. AKSUM provides semi-automatic high-level performance bottleneck detection through a special-purpose performance property specification language. The Grid-Prophet enables the user to model and predict the performance of parallel and distributed applications at early development stages. In this chapter we describe the overall architecture of the ASKALON tool set and outline the basic functionality of the four constituent tools. The structure of each tool is based on the composition and sharing of remote Web services, thus enabling tool interoperability. In addition, a Data Repository allows the tools to share common application performance and output data which has been derived by the individual tools. A Service Repository is used to store common portable Web service implementations. A general-purpose Factory service is employed to create service instances on arbitrary remote computing sites. Discovering and dynamically binding to existing remote services is achieved through a Registry service. The ASKALON visualization diagrams support both online and post-mortem visualization of performance and output data.We demonstrate the usefulness and effectiveness of ASKALON by applying the tools to a variety of real-world applications. © 2009 Springer London.