Debugging And Performance Tuning For Parallel Computing Systems

For several years, it has been economically and technically feasible to build parallel systems that scale from tens to hundreds of processors. By necessity tools embody knowledge of the execution environment, identifying performance bottlenecks or logical program errors in terms of application code constructs and their interaction with the execution environment. Experience comes with time, as tool developers understand the common programming idioms, the interactions of application code and the underlying hardware and software, and the user interfaces best suited for relating these interactions in intuitive ways. Simply put developing good tools takes time, experience, and substantial effort.

This book contains papers and working group summaries from discussions on software tools for parallel computer systems that explore the current situation, outline research issues, and technology transition remedies. Developers of both debugging and performance analysis tools and application developers and vendors discuss the technical and sociological problems facing the field. The goal of this book is to maximize the return from shared development so that the reader can learn from others' needs and frustrations in building and using tools on parallel systems. It covers three major research themes: tools for task and data parallel languages, techniques for real-time adaptive system control, and optimization of heterogeneous metacomputing applications.

1. Performance and Debugging Tools: A Research and Development Checkpoint.

2. Tools: A Research Point of View.

Integrating Compilation and Performance Analysis for Data-Parallel Programs (Vikram S. Adve).

Integrating A Debugger and Performance Tool for Steering (Barton P. Miller).

Visualization, Debugging, and Performance in PVM (G.A. Geist).

Program Analysis and Tuning Tools for a Parallel Object Oriented Language: An Experiment with the TAU System (Dennis Gannon).

Race Detection -
Ten Years Later (C.E. McDowell).

Debugging and Performance Analysis Tools (Joan M. Francioni).

3. Tools: A Vendor Point of View.

A Scalable Debugger for Massively Parallel Message-Passing Programs (Rich Title).

A Building Block Approach to Parallel Tool Construction (Don Breazeal).

Visualizing Performance on Parallel Supercomputers (Marty Itzkowitz).

Multiple View of Parallel Application Execution (Ming C. Hao).

A Performance Tool for The CRAY T3D (Douglas M. Pase).

4. Tools: An Applications Point of View.

Issues of Running Codes on Very Large Parallel Processing Systems (Don Heller).

Opportunities and Tools for Highly Interactive Distributed and Parallel Computing (Karsten Schwan).

Methodologies for Developing Scientific Applications on the CRAY T3D (Nicholas A. Nystrom).

Tuning I/O Performance on the Paragon: Fun with Pablo and Norma (Carl Winstead).

Prospects of Solving Grand Challenge Problems (Rajan Gupta).

Portability and Performance Problems on Massively Parallel Supercomputers (David M. Beazley).

5. Updates and Working-Group Summaries.

Collaborative Efforts to Develop User-Oriented Parallel Tools (Cherri M. Pancake).

High-Performance Fortran Forum Status Report (Mary Zosel).

Summary of Working Group on Integrated Environments Vs. Toolkit (Diane T. Rover).

Working Group: Tools for Workstation Clusters (Robert Dilly).