Detecting and using critical paths at runtime in message driven parallel programs

Detecting critical paths in traditional message passing parallel programs can be useful for post-mortem performance analysis. This paper presents an efficient online algorithm for detecting critical paths for message-driven parallel programs. Initial implementations of the algorithm have been created in three message-driven parallel languages: Charm++, Charisma, and Structured Dagger. Not only does this work describe a novel implementation of critical path detection for the message-driven programs, but also the resulting critical paths are successfully used as the program runs for automatic performance tuning. The actionable information provided by the critical path is shown to be useful for online performance tuning within the context of the message driven parallel model, whereas it has never been used for online purposes within the traditional message passing model.