Performance monitoring in a Myrinet-connected SHRIMP cluster

Abstract

Performance monitoring is a crucial aspect of parallel programming. Extractingthe best possible performance from the system is the main goal of parallel programming, and monitoring tools are often essential to achieving that goal. Acommon tradeoff arises in determining at which system level to monitor performance information and present results. High-level monitoring approaches can often gather data directly tied to the software programming model, but may abstract away crucial low-level hardware details. Lowlevel monitoring approaches can gather fairly complete performance information about the underlyingsystem,but often at the expense of portability and flexibility. In this paper we discuss a compromise approach between the portabilityand flexibility of high-level monitoring and the detailed data awareness of low-level monitoring. We present a firmware-based performance monitor we designed for a Myrinet-connected Shrimp cluster. This monitor combines the portability and flexibilityty...