Construction and evaluation of coordinated performance skeletons
Qiang Xu, Jaspal Subhlok · 2008
Abstract. Performance prediction is particularly challenging for dynamic environments that cannot be modeled well due to reasons such as resource sharing and foreign system components. The approach to performance prediction taken in this work is based on the concept of a performance skeleton which is a short running program whose execution time in any scenario reflects the estimated execution time of the application it represents. The fundamental technical challenge addressed in this paper is the automatic construction of performance skeletons for parallel MPI programs. The steps in the skeleton construction procedure are 1) generation of process execution traces and conversion to a single coordinated logical program trace, 2) compression of the logical program trace, and 3) conversion to an executable parallel skeleton program. Results are presented to validate the construction methodology and prediction power of performance skeletons. The execution scenarios analyzed involve network sharing, different architectures and different MPI libraries. The emphasis is on identifying the strength and limitations of this approach to performance prediction. 1