PATHA: Performance Analysis Tool for HPC Applications

Large science projects rely on complex workflows to analyze terabytes or petabytes of data. These jobs are often running over thousands of CPU cores and simultaneously performing data accesses, data movements, and computation. It is difficult to identify bottlenecks or to debug the performance issues in these large workflows. To address these challenges, we have developed Performance Analysis Tool for HPC Applications (PATHA) using the state-of-art open source big data processing tools. Our framework can ingest system logs to extract key performance measures, and apply the most sophisticated statistical tools and data mining methods on the performance data. It utilizes an efficient data processing engine to allow users to interactively analyze a large amount of different types of logs and measurements. To illustrate the functionality of PATHA, we conduct a case study on the workflows from an astronomy project known as the Palomar Transient Factory (PTF). Our study processed 1.6 TB of system logs collected on the NERSC supercomputer Edison. Using PATHA, we were able to identify performance bottlenecks, which reside in three tasks of PTF workflow with the dependency on the density of celestial objects.