OpenMP® runtime instrumentation for optimization

Abstract

The OpenMP (The OpenMP name is a registered trademark of the OpenMP Architecture Review Board.) application programming interface provides a simple way for programmers to write parallel programs that are portable between machines and vendors. Programmers parallelize their programs to obtain higher performance, but, as the number of cores per processor increases, taking advantage of parallelism efficiently becomes more difficult. To facilitate efficient parallelization and avoid poor utilization of machine resources, programmers need to know where an application is spending time and what factors hinder scalability. In this paper, we present a Tool for Runtime Instrumentation of OpenMP programs (TRIO) that automatically collects statistics about an application’s use of the OpenMP runtime. TRIO provides statistics such as the total number of times an OpenMP construct is called, the time spent in each OpenMP construct, and the total time spent within the OpenMP runtime. TRIO helps to identify the runtime calls where a program spends most of the time and which constructs are called the most at runtime.