Dynamic performance tuning of distributed programming libraries

Abstract

The use of distributed programming libraries is very common in the development of scientific and engineering applications. These libraries, from message passing libraries to numerical libraries, are designed in a very general way to be useful for a wide range of applications. Therefore, there are several polices that must be adapted to the particular application, system and input data to provide the expected performance. Our objective is develop an environment for tuning the use of a distributed library on the fly according to the dynamic behavior of the applications. In this paper, we present as an example a tuning environment for PVM-based applications. We show potential bottlenecks when using PVM. We also include tuning scenarios that describe the evaluation of the application behavior and the solutions that can improve the performance. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2003.