Towards automatic performance analysis

Most existing performance tools provide generic measurements and visual displays. It is then the responsibility of the users to analyze the performance of their programs using the displayed information. This can be a non-trivial task, because one needs to identify specific pieces of information needed for such analysis. A good performance analysis tool should be able to provide intelligent analysis, and not just feedback, about the performance of a parallel program. Such automatic performance analysis is feasible for programming paradigms that expose sufficient information about program behavior. Charm, a portable, object-based, and message-driven parallel programming language is one such paradigm. We describe the design and implementation of Projections:Expert, a framework for automatic performance analysis for Charm programs