Aksum: a performance analysis tool for parallel and distributed applications

  • Authors:
  • Thomas Fahringer;Clovis Seragiotto, Jr.

  • Affiliations:
  • Institute for Software Science, University of Vienna, Vienna, Austria;Institute for Software Science, University of Vienna, Vienna, Austria

  • Venue:
  • Performance analysis and grid computing
  • Year:
  • 2004

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Abstract

Aksum is a multi-experiment performance analysis tool for message passing, shared memory and mixed parallelism programs; it automatically instruments the user's application, generates versions of this application using a set of usersupplied input parameters, collect the data generated by the instrumentation and analyzes it, relates the performance problems back to the source code, and compares the performance behavior across multiple experiments.Aksum automatically searches for performance bottlenecks based on the concept of performance properties. In contrast to much existing work, performance properties are normalized (values between 0 for the best case and 1 for the worst case), enabling the user to interpret the resulting performance behavior. Aksum is highly customizable, which allows the user to build or define his own performance tool. Performance properties are defined in JavaPSL, and may be freely edited, removed from or added to Aksum in order to customize and speedup the search process. The performance properties found can be grouped, filtered, and displayed in several dimensions. Experiments with a material science code are shown in order to demonstrate the usefulness of our approach.