iPSC/2 system: a second generation hypercube
C3P Proceedings of the third conference on Hypercube concurrent computers and applications: Architecture, software, computer systems, and general issues - Volume 1
C3P Proceedings of the third conference on Hypercube concurrent computers and applications: Architecture, software, computer systems, and general issues - Volume 1
Hypercube implementation of the simplex algorithm
C3P Proceedings of the third conference on Hypercube concurrent computers and applications - Volume 2
Experiences with hypercube operating system instrumentation
International Journal of High Speed Computing - Special issue: session on parallel systems performance
Time, clocks, and the ordering of events in a distributed system
Communications of the ACM
The SNAP-1 parallel AI prototype
ISCA '91 Proceedings of the 18th annual international symposium on Computer architecture
Dynamic control of performance monitoring on large scale parallel systems
ICS '93 Proceedings of the 7th international conference on Supercomputing
A bibliography of parallel debuggers, 1993 edition
PADD '93 Proceedings of the 1993 ACM/ONR workshop on Parallel and distributed debugging
I/O, Performance Analysis, and Performance Data Immersion
MASCOTS '96 Proceedings of the 4th International Workshop on Modeling, Analysis, and Simulation of Computer and Telecommunications Systems
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The complexity of parallel computer systems makes a priori performance prediction difficult and experimental performance analysis crucial. A complete characterization of software and hardware dynamics, needed to understand the performance of high-performance parallel systems, requires execution time performance instrumentation. Although software recording of performance data suffices for low frequency events, capture of detailed, high-frequency performance data ultimately requires hardware support if the performance instrumentation is to remain efficient and unobtrusive.This paper describes the design of HYPERMON, a hardware system to capture and record software performance traces generated on the Intel iPSC/2 hypercube. HYPERMON represents a compromise between fully-passive hardware monitoring and software event tracing; software generated events are extracted from each node, timestamped, and externally recorded by HYPERMON. Using an instrumented version of the iPSC/2 operating system and several application programs, we present a performance analysis of an operational HYPERMON prototype and assess the limitations of the current design. Based on these results, we suggest design modifications that should permit capture of event traces from the coming generation of high-performance distributed memory parallel systems.