Measuring and Visualizing Thread Communications for Pthread Applications

Entering the era of multi/many core processors, multithreading has been used by applications frequently to enhance performance. However, with the increasing of thread number, dynamic behaviors of thread executions become more complex as well as making performance tuning more difficult. In this paper, we present a way to analyze the performance with the communication graph which describes how threads in parallel programs communicate with each other. We obtain runtime information during the actual executions of real-world applications, generates thread interaction graph and provides multiple visualization methods to programmers as an assistance of performance-tuning. The graphs are useful for optimization of programs, optimization of scheduling and deterministic accessing analysis of shared data.