Performance Tool Support for MPI-2 on Linux

Programmers of message-passing codes for clusters of workstations face a daunting challenge in understanding the performance bottlenecks of their applications. This is largely due to the vast amount of performance data that is collected, and the time and expertise necessary to use traditional parallel performance tools to analyze that data. This paper reports on our recent efforts developing a performance tool for MPI applications on Linux clusters. Our target MPI implementations were LAM/MPI and MPICH2, both of which support portions of the MPI-2 Standard. We started with an existing performance tool and added support for non-shared file systems, MPI-2 one-sided communications, dynamic process creation, and MPI Object naming. We present results using the enhanced version of the tool to examine the performance of several applications. We describe a new performance tool benchmark suite we have developed, PPerfMark, and present results for the benchmark using the enhanced tool.