Assigning blame: Mapping performance to high level parallel programming abstractions

Abstract

Parallel programs are increasingly being written using programming frameworks and other environments that allow parallel constructs to be programmed with greater ease. The data structures used allow the modeling of complex mathematical structures like linear systems and partial differential equations using high-level programming abstractions. While this allows programmers to model complex systems in a more intuitive way, it also makes the debugging and profiling of these systems more difficult due to the complexity of mapping these high level abstractions down to the low level parallel programming constructs. This work discusses mapping mechanisms, called variable blame, for creating these mappings and using them to assist in the profiling and debugging of programs created using advanced parallel programming techniques. We also include an example of a prototype implementation of the system profiling three programs. © 2009 Springer.