A performance debugging tool for high performance Fortran programs

Abstract

Parallel languages allow the programmer to express parallelism at a high level. The management of parallelism and the generation of interprocessor communication is left to the compiler and the runtime system. This approach to parallel programming is particularly attractive if a suitable widely accepted parallel language is available. High Performance Fortran (HPF) has emerged as the first popular machine independent parallel language, and remarkable progress has been made towards compiling HPF efficiently. However, the performance of HPF programs is often poor and unpredictable, and obtaining adequate performance is a major stumbling block that must be overcome if HPF is to gain widespread acceptance. The programmer is often in the dark about how to improve the performance of an HPF program since poor performance can be attributed to a variety of reasons, including poor choice of algorithm, limited use of parallelism, or an inefficient data mapping. This paper presents a profiling tool that allows the programmer to identify the regions of the program that execute inefficiently, and to focus on the potential causes of poor performance. The central idea is to distinguish the code that is executing efficiently from the code that is executing poorly. Efficient code uses all processors of a parallel system to make progress, while inefficient code causes processors to wait, execute replicated code, idle, communicate, or perform compiler bookkeeping. We designate the latter code as non-scalable, since adding more processors generally does not lead to improved performance for such code. By analogy, the former code is called scalable. The tool presented here separates a program into scalable and non-scalable components and identifies the causes of non-scalability of different components. We show that compiler information is the key to dividing the execution times into logical categories that are meaningful to the programmer. We present the design and implementation of a profiler that is integrated with Fx, a compiler for a variant of HPF. The paper includes two examples that demonstrate how the data reported by the profiler are used to identify and resolve performance bugs in parallel programs. © 1997 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.