Modeling and Detecting Performance Problems for Distributed and Parallel Programs with JavaPSL

In this paper we present JavaPSL, a Performance Specification Language that can be used for a systematic and portable specification of large classes of experiment-related data and performance properties for distributed and parallel programs. Performance properties are described in a generic and normalized way, thus interpretation and comparison of performance properties is largely alleviated. Moreover, JavaPSL provides meta-properties in order to describe new properties based on existing ones and to relate properties to each other. JavaPSL uses Java and its powerful mechanisms, in particular, polymorphism, abstract classes, and reflection to describe experiment-related data and performance properties. JavaPSL can also be considered as a performance information interface based on which sophisticated performance tools can be built or other tools can access performance data in a portable way. We have implemented a prototype performance tool that uses JavaPSL to automatically detect performance bottlenecks for MPI, OpenMP, and mixed OpenMP and MPI programs. Several experiments with realistic codes demonstrate the usefulness of JavaPSL.