Prototype Visualization Tools For Multi-Experiment Performance Analysis

The analysis of modern, parallelized applications, such as scientific modeling, is of interest to a variety of people within the computing community of the Department of Defense (DoD). Persons desiring insight into the performance of these large programs include application users, application programmers/developers, portfolio and center managers, and others. The analysis needed requires the examination of large data sets obtained from various performance analysis sources including, but not limited to, hardware counters, software event counters, communications event counters, and unrelated instrumentation code inserted into programs. The PCAT (Performance Analysis Team) at the University of Texas-El Paso (UTEP) has developed a suite of tools consisting of a performance database access tool and four different visualization methods to aid diverse DoD users in analyzing certain performance issues associated with serial and, especially, parallel programs. The tools are written in Java and provide multiple views of different aspects of performance metrics associated with a performance database. Preliminary analysis of two different codes resulted in PCAT users identifying possible sources of performance degradation solely from examination of performance metrics, without access to the source code