Diagnosing performance bottlenecks in emerging petascale applications

Abstract

Cutting-edge science and engineering applications require petascale computing. It is, however, a significant challenge to use petascale computing platforms effectively. Consequently, there is a critical need for performance tools that enable scientists to understand impediments to performance on emerging petascale systems. In this paper, we describe HPCToolkit---a suite of multi-platform tools that supports sampling-based analysis of application performance on emerging petascale platforms. HPCToolkit uses sampling to pinpoint and quantify both scaling and node performance bottlenecks. We study several emerging petascale applications on the Cray XT and IBM BlueGene/P platforms and use HPCToolkit to identify specific source lines --- in their full calling context --- associated with performance bottlenecks in these codes. Such information is exactly what application developers need to know to improve their applications to take full advantage of the power of petascale systems.