Extending K-Scope Fortran Source Code Analyzer with Visualization of Performance Profiling Data and Remote Parsing of Source Code

Abstract

K-scope is a source code analysis tool with a graphical user interface for the performance tuning of Fortran programs. With K-scope, developers are able to visually understand the structures of their Fortran programs and estimate their performance. However, the original version of K-scope has two problems. First, it lacks the ability to integrate the results of source code analysis with performance profiling data. Second, it requires developers to install XcalableMP because K-scope utilizes the front-end of the XcalableMP compiler. However it is difficult to set up the XcalableMP environment because this requires installing and configuring several libraries and applications. A binary package of XcalableMP is only available for major Linux distributions, and developers thus have a hard time installing XcalableMP on other environments, e.g., Windows. In order to address these two problems, we extend K-scope with two mechanisms. The first visualizes performance profiling data and the second offloads the parsing of Fortran programs to a remote server. More specifically, the visualization mechanism enables users to readily identify performance bottlenecks in their programs by mapping performance profiling data to each line of the source code. With the offloading mechanism, developers no longer need to install XcalableMP. Instead, they can connect K-scope to a remote server on which XcalableMP is installed, and which generates the intermediate code used for analysis. For this purpose, we develop a tool named SSHconnect. To verify the effectiveness of our extended K-scope, we analyze the Nonhydrostatic Icosahedral Atmospheric Model (NICAM) code, an application for global climate simulation that consists of about 300,000 lines of Fortran code. We found that K-scope successfully identified performance bottlenecks in the NICAM code and translated the source code for several applications using its remote parsing mechanism.