Date: Tue, 05 Nov 1996 20:59:06 GMT Server: NCSA/1.5 Content-type: text/html Last-modified: Mon, 19 Aug 1996 19:36:02 GMT Content-length: 2782
Traditional performance tools for sequential machines fail to scale to large parallel systems. Normal post-mortem-style tools typically collect information about all events that occur during execution; this can produce trace data at a rate of several Gigabytes per second on a machine with thousands of nodes, a rate which is impossible for a performance tool to cope with. The standard solution to this problem is to collect only a small subset of available performance data. However, choosing the right set of metrics is difficult or impossible to know a priori, and places a large decision-making burden on the programmer.
Paradyn takes a new approach, called dynamic instrumentation, that is based on dynamically controlling what performance data is to be collected. Dynamic instrumentation allows data collection instructions to be inserted into an application program during runtime. Paradyn is able to look for a variety of performance problems during a single execution, while not being overwhelmed with all the available data at any one time. In addition, dynamic instrumentation that has not be inserted incurs no overhead, in contrast to instrumentation that is staticly-inserted but currently disabled.
Paradyn provides decision support for the tool user. Paradyn assists the user in deciding which bottlenecks to look for; in fact, Paradyn can search automatically to isolate performance bottlenecks, and then explain them to the user using descriptions or visualizations.
Paradyn incorporates a new approach for describing performance information to users of high-level parallel languages; Paradyn maps performance data between multiple layers of abstraction, and user can choose to look at it in terms of high-level language constructs or low-level machine structures.
Since Fall 1994, we have been collaborating with the Wisconsin Wind Tunnel Project to support Paradyn on their Blizzard platform (both CM-5 and Cluster of Workstation versions).
A recent Wisconsin Week article summarizes our current ARPA funding and has commentary from Profs. Bart Miller and Mark Hill.
Paradyn Release 1.1 is available for SunOS, Solaris, AIX, SP2, HP-UX, and PVM.