Model-Based Relative Performance Diagnosis of Wavefront Parallel Computations

Abstract

Parallel performance diagnosis can be improved with the use of performance knowledge about parallel computation models. The Hercule diagnosis system applies model-based methods to automate performance diagnosis processes and explain performance problems from high-level computation semantics. However, Hercule is limited by a single experiment view. Here we introduce the concept of relative performance diagnosis and show how it can be integrated in a model-based diagnosis framework. The paper demonstrates the effectiveness of Hercule’s approach to relative diagnosis of the well-known Sweep3D application based on a Wavefront model. Relative diagnoses of Sweep3D performance anomalies in strong and weak scaling cases are given.