Title: The Tracefile Testbed: a community repository for identifying and retrieving HPC performance data

Authors: Ken Ferschweiler, Scott Harrah, Dylan Keon, Mariacarla Calzarossa, Daniele Tessera, Cherri Pancake

Addresses: Northwest Alliance for Computational Science and Engineering, 218 CH2M Hill Alumni Center, Oregon State University, Corvallis, 97331 OR, USA. ' Weatherhead School of Management, Case Western Reserve University, 10900 Euclid Avenue Cleveland, 44106 OH, USA. ' Northwest Alliance for Computational Science and Engineering, 218 CH2M Hill Alumni Center, Oregon State University, Corvallis, 97331 OR, USA. ' Dipartimento di Informatica e Sistemistica, Universita di Pavia, via Ferrata, 1 I-27100 Pavia, Italy. ' Dipartimento di Matematica e Fisica, Universita Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, via Musei, 41 I-25121 Brescia, Italy. ' School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, 102 Dearborn Hall, Oregon State University, Corvallis, 97331 OR, USA

Abstract: HPC programmers utilise tracefiles, which record program behaviour in great detail, as the basis for many performance analysis activities. The lack of generally accessible tracefiles has forced programmers to develop their own testbeds in order to study the basic performance characteristics of the platforms they use. Because tracefiles serve as input to performance analysis and performance prediction tools, tool developers have also been hindered by the lack of a testbed for verifying and fine-tuning tool functionality. A community repository that meets the needs of both application and tool developers has been created in this study. In this paper, we describe how the Tracefile Testbed was designed to facilitate flexible searching and retrieval of tracefiles based on a variety of characteristics has been described. Its web-based interface provides a convenient mechanism for browsing, downloading, and uploading collections of tracefiles and tracefile segments, as well as viewing statistical summaries of performance characteristics.

Keywords: computer science; data communication; database management systems; high performance computing; performance tuning; performance monitoring; tracefiles.

DOI: 10.1504/IJHPCN.2005.008030

International Journal of High Performance Computing and Networking, 2005 Vol.3 No.2/3, pp.95 - 102

Published online: 10 Nov 2005 *

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