Crossing Boundaries in TimeTrial: Monitoring Communications across Architecturally Diverse Computing Platforms

Time Trial is a low-impact performance monitor that supports streaming data applications deployed on a variety of architecturally diverse computational platforms, including multicore processors and field-programmable gate arrays. Communication between resources in architecturally diverse systems is frequently a limitation to overall application performance. Understanding these bottlenecks is crucial to understanding overall application performance. Direct measurement of inter-resource communications channel occupancy is not readily achievable without significantly impacting performance of the application itself. Here, we present Time Trial´s approach to monitoring those queues that cross platform boundaries. Since the approach includes a combination of direct measurement and modeling, we also describe circumstances under which the model can be shown to be inappropriate. Examples with several micro-benchmark applications (for which the true measurement is known) and an application that uses Monte Carlo techniques to solve Lap lace´s equation are used for illustrative purposes.