Performance analysis of parallel programs using Prober as a single aid tool

Prober is a functional and performance analysis tool for parallel programs, developed during an undergraduate research project. In this paper we show the new expanded version of Prober, in which some features from different software tools are aggregated. It can be used as a single tool to aid the developer in the performance analysis of parallel programs. Our main goal is to provide a new version of Prober, with additional features. Among them we can highlight: the interpretation of user scripts, a user-level support library, the generation of speedup and efficiency graphics, batch execution and a new user interface. In order to show, verify and analyze the use of the new version of Prober, we did performance tests in a parallel image convolution program. We added performance measuring routines to collect performance data within different internal code segments; built a set of scripts to specify the performance tests; ran the set of scripts in batch mode; used Prober to generate graphics and statistics based on the collected performance data; and analyzed the results using Prober as an aid tool.