A Minimally Intrusive Approach for Automatic Assessment of Parallel Performance Scalability of Shared-Memory HPC Applications

Abstract

High-performance computing systems have become increasingly dynamic, complex, and unpredictable. To help build software that uses full-system capabilities, performance measurement and analysis tools exploit extensive execution analysis focusing on single-run results. Despite being effective in identifying performance hotspots and bottlenecks, these tools are not sufficiently suitable to evaluate the overall scalability trends of parallel applications. Either they lack the support for combining data from multiple runs or collect excessive data, causing unnecessary overhead. In this work, we present a tool for automatically measuring and comparing several executions of a parallel application according to various scenarios characterized by the input arrangements, the number of threads, number of cores, and frequencies. Unlike other existing performance analysis tools, the proposed work covers some gaps in specialized features necessary to better understand computational resources scalability trends across configurations. In order to improve scalability analysis and productivity over the vast spectrum of possible configurations, the proposed tool features automatic instrumentation, direct mapping of parallel regions, accuracy-preserving data reductions, and ease of use. As it aims at accurately understanding scalability trends of parallel applications, detailed single-run performance analyses show minimal intrusion (less than 1% overhead).