aradyn is a tool for measuring the performance of large-scale parallel programs. Our goal in designing a new performance tool was to provide detailed, flexible performance information without incurring the space (and time) overhead typically associated with trace-based tools. Paradyn achieves this goal by dynamically instrumenting the application and automatically controlling this instrumentation in search of performance problems. Dynamic instrumentation lets us defer insertion until the moment it is needed (and remove it when it is no longer needed); Paradyn's Performance Consultant decides when and where to insert instrumentation. PRINCIPLES AND CHARAClERlSTlCS Seven principles guided the design of Paradyn: scalability, automated search, well-defined data abstractions, support for heterogeneous environments and high-level languages, open interfaces, and streamlined use. Below, we describe these principles and summarize the features in Paradyn that incorporate them. We need to measure long-running programs (hours or days) on large (about 1,000 node) parallel machines using large data sets. For correctness debugging, you can often test a program on small data sets and be confident that it will work correctly on larger ones, but for performance tuning, this is often not the case. In many real applications, as program and data-set size increase, different resources saturate and become bottlenecks. We must also measure large programs that have hundreds of modules and thousands of procedures. The mechanisms for instrumentation, program control, and data display must gracefully handle this large number of program components. Paradyn uses dynamic instrumentation to instrument only those parts of the program relevant to finding the current performance problem. It starts looking for high-level problems (such as too much total synchronization blocking, I/O blocking, or memory delays) for the whole program. Only a small amount of instrumentation is inserted to find these problems. Once a general problem is found, instrumentation is inserted to find more specific causes. No detailed instrumentation is inserted for classes of problems that do not exist.
Paradyn REF is a tool for automated on-line performance analysis based on dynamic instrumentation.
The paradyn parallel performance measurement tools
IEEE Computer
Computer Science