Unifying the Analysis of Performance Event Streams at the Consumer Interface Level

Several instrumentation interfaces have been developed for parallel programs to make observable actions that take place during execution and to make accessible information about the program’s behavior and performance. Following in the footsteps of the successful profiling interface for MPI (PMPI), new rich interfaces to expose internal operation of MPI (MPI-T) and OpenMP (OMPT) runtimes are now in the standards. Taking advantage of these interfaces requires tools to selectively collect events from multiples interfaces by various techniques: function interposition (PMPI), value read (MPI-T), and callbacks (OMPT). In this paper, we present the unified instrumentation pipeline proposed by the MALP infrastructure that can be used to forward a variety of fine-grained events from multiple interfaces online to multi-threaded analysis processes implemented orthogonally with plugins. In essence, our contribution complements “front-end” instrumentation mechanisms by a generic “back-end” event consumption interface that allows “consumer” callbacks to generate performance measurements in various formats for analysis and transport. With such support, online and post-mortem cases become similar from an analysis point of view, making it possible to build more unified and consistent analysis frameworks. The paper describes the approach and demonstrates its benefits with several use cases.