An open-source tool-chain for performance analysis

Abstract

Modern supercomputers with multi-core nodes enhanced by accelerators as well as hybrid programming models introduce more complexity in modern applications. Efficiently exploiting all of the available resources requires a complex performance analysis of applications in order to detect time-consuming or idle sections. This paper presents an open-source tool-chain for analyzing the performance of parallel applications. It is composed of a trace generation framework called EZTRACE, a generic interface for writing traces in multipe formats called GTG, and a trace visualizer called VITE. These tools cover the main steps of performance analysis - from the instrumentation of applications to the trace analysis - and are designed to maximize the compatibility with other performance analysis tools. Thus, these tools support multiple file formats and are not bound to a particular programming model. The evaluation of these tools show that they provide similar performance compared to other analysis tools. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2012.