The Cilkview scalability analyzer

Abstract

The Cilkview scalability analyzer is a software tool for profiling, estimating scalability, and benchmarking multithreaded Cilk++ applications. Cilkview monitors logical parallelism during an instrumented execution of the Cilk++ application on a single processing core. As Cilkview executes, it analyzes logical dependencies within the computation to determine its work and span (critical-path length). These metrics allow Cilkview to estimate parallelism and predict how the application will scale with the number of processing cores. In addition, Cilkview analyzes cheduling overhead using the concept of a "burdened dag," which allows it to diagnose performance problems in the application due to an insufficient grain size of parallel subcomputations.