Towards Scalable Performance Analysis of MPI Parallel Applications

Sammanfattning:   A considerably fraction of science discovery is nowadays relying on computer simulations. High Performance Computing  (HPC) provides scientists with the means to simulate processes ranging from climate modeling to protein folding. However, achieving good application performance and making an optimal use of HPC resources is a heroic task due to the complexity of parallel software. Therefore, performance tools  and runtime systems that help users to execute  applications in the most optimal way are of utmost importance in the landscape of HPC.  In this thesis, we explore different techniques to tackle the challenges of collecting, storing, and using  fine-grained performance data. First, we investigate the automatic use of real-time performance data in order to run applications in an optimal way. To that end, we present a prototype of an adaptive task-based runtime system that uses real-time performance data for task scheduling. This runtime system has a performance monitoring component that provides real-time access to the performance behavior of anapplication while it runs. The implementation of this monitoring component is presented and evaluated within this thesis. Secondly, we explore lossless compression approaches  for MPI monitoring. One of the main problems that  performance tools face is the huge amount of fine-grained data that can be generated from an instrumented application. Collecting fine-grained data from a program is the best method to uncover the root causes of performance bottlenecks, however, it is unfeasible with extremely parallel applications  or applications with long execution times. On the other hand, collecting coarse-grained data is scalable but  sometimes not enough to discern the root cause of a performance problem. Thus, we propose a new method for performance monitoring of MPI programs using event flow graphs. Event flow graphs  provide very low overhead in terms of execution time and  storage size, and can be used to reconstruct fine-grained trace files of application events ordered in time.