Performance Analysis of Applications in the Context of Architectural Rooflines
Boyana Norris, Wyatt Spear, Allen D. Malony · 2017
Intuitive visual representations of architecture capabilities and the performance of applications are critical to enabling effective performance analysis, which in turn guides optimizations. The Roofline Model and its derivatives provide such an intuitive representation of the best achievable performance on a given architecture. The Roofline Toolkit project is a collaboration among researchers at Argonne National Laboratory, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, and the University of Oregon and consists of three principal components: hardware characterization, software characterization, and data manipulation, which includes a visualization interface. These components address the different aspects of performance data acquisition and manipulation required for performance analysis, modeling and optimization of applications. In this paper we introduce an implementation of the third component, a system for visualizing roofline charts and managing roofline performance analysis data. We demonstrate analysis of an application use case within this framework and outline future directions for this type of performance analysis and visualization.