PerfVis-Home

Performance Visualization
for
Parallel Programs


Background

A parallel program is intrinsically more complex than its serial counterpart. To write an efficient and scalable parallel program, one must understand the behavior and performance of the program. A powerful technique for this purpose is the visualization of trace files (also called log files). A trace file contains several basic elements. Typically, these are generated during the execution of a program by very short code sequences (so as to minimize the perturbation of the execution caused by the tracing) and are written either to disk (buffered) or to memory as they are generated. Tracefiles typically contain sequences of events; an event has a timestamp and some data. A collection of events for a single process, thread, or processor is sometimes called a timeline. Such postmortem analysis based on trace files has been an important tool for performance analysis for parallel programs. Many performance visualization tools display a trace file as a GANTT chart, with the x-axis representing time and the y-axis representing process or thread number.

Latest News

  • The latest version of MPE2 that contains slog2sdk is released on 8/26/2015. MPE2 has been shown to work with Open MPI, MPICH, MPICH2, and the commercial MPI implementations on IBM's AIX, NEC SX-8, Cray X1E, Cray XT4 (catamount) and BlueGene based MPI implementations found on BG/L, BG/P, and BG/Q and is also reported to work with HP-MPI 2.0.1 (Linux AMD64). The new release provides thread-safe MPI logging support and friendlier enhancement of Jumpshot for threaded slog2 file.
  • slog2sdk verion 1.2.6 which includes SLOG-2 and Jumpshot-4 has been released on 07/12/2007. slog2rte is also made available for native Windows users. This release includes some statistics data in the Legend window and friendlier enchancement for viewing threaded slog2 file.
  • Click here for pictures of our latest tool for performance visualization of FLASH, an astrophysics code. Click here for more pictures of Jumpshot-4 for MM5, a climate simulation program. For older tools, please visit our Software page.

  • LANS FLASH