A generalized, distributed analysis system for optimization of Parallel Applications

Developing a high performance parallel application is difficult. An application must often be analyzed and optimized by the programmer before reaching an acceptable level of performance. Performance tools that collect and visualize performance data can reduce the effort needed by the user in the nontrivial optimization process. However, as the size of the performance dataset grows, it becomes nearly impossible for the user to manually examine the data and find performance issues. To address this problem, we have developed a new analysis system to automatically detect, diagnose, and possibly resolve bottlenecks. In this paper, we present the architecture and the distributed, peer-to-peer processing mechanism of a programming model-independent analysis system, which includes a range of useful analyses such as scalability analysis and common-bottleneck detection. We then describe the details of an initial sequential implementation of the system that has been integrated into our parallel performance wizard (PPW) tool. Finally, we provide correctness and performance results for this initial version and demonstrate the effectiveness of the system through two case studies.