On efficiently implementing global time for performance evaluation on multiprocessor systems
Journal of Parallel and Distributed Computing
Time, clocks, and the ordering of events in a distributed system
Communications of the ACM
Introduction to Algorithms
IEEE Concurrency
An Adaptive Cost System for Parallel Program Instrumentation
Euro-Par '96 Proceedings of the Second International Euro-Par Conference on Parallel Processing - Volume I
The Tau Parallel Performance System
International Journal of High Performance Computing Applications
MapReduce: simplified data processing on large clusters
OSDI'04 Proceedings of the 6th conference on Symposium on Opearting Systems Design & Implementation - Volume 6
Compensation of Measurement Overhead in Parallel Performance Profiling
International Journal of High Performance Computing Applications
CellSs: making it easier to program the cell broadband engine processor
IBM Journal of Research and Development
Trace-based Performance Analysis on Cell BE
ISPASS '08 Proceedings of the ISPASS 2008 - IEEE International Symposium on Performance Analysis of Systems and software
MapReduce for the cell broadband engine architecture
IBM Journal of Research and Development
Hi-index | 0.00 |
Optimizing performance on multicore processors is a daunting task M. S. Chang because of the increased importance of such factors as thread communication, memory contention, and memory access latency. This paper presents two tools that programmers and performance analysts can use to understand application performance on the Cell Broadband Engine® (Cell/B.E.) processor: the Performance Debugging Tool (PDT) and the Trace Analyzer (TA). PDT traces user-space events, augmenting them with scheduling data from the operating system; those traces are then read, analyzed, and presented visually by the TA. This paper describes the implementation issues arising from the fact that a common lowoverhead clock shared by all cores, essential for analysis and visualization, is not available on the Cell/B.E. processor. The TA employs an offline analysis to align the collected events to a common time based only on thread-local timestamps, event order, and context switch information. We also discuss the overhead of tracing and its impact on execution and performance analysis. We illustrate the use of the PDT and TA by analyzing several significant Cell/B.E. processor workloads, including native code and higher-level abstractions offered by the Data Communication and Synchronization services. We show how trace analysis can help identify performance issues in these workloads and how it can be used by programmers to spot performance antipatterns (common programming practices leading to suboptimal performance).