Asking for Performance: Exploiting Developer Intuition to Guide Instrumentation with TimeTrial

Architecturally-diverse systems (containing co-processors such as reconfigurable logic and graphics engines) have received significant attention recently in the high performance computing community. They are new enough, however, that application development tools are quite limited. This paper describes our performance measurement system, Time Trial, that automates performance measurements of diverse, streaming data applications. Time Trial enables low-impact measurements by interpreting performance queries in the Time Trial language and by compiling these queries to highly-specific, optimized instrumentation that aggressively performs lossy compression on the performance meta-data. Currently, Time Trial supports multi-core processors and reconfigurable logic, with GPU support under development. We present the Time Trial language and its associated compiler, including its use in optimizing the performance of an example computational science problem.