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Ordering Traces Logically to Identify Lateness in Message Passing Programs

Journal Article · · IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems
 [1];  [2];  [2];  [2];  [1];  [2]
  1. Univ. of California, Davis, CA (United States)
  2. Lawrence Livermore National Lab. (LLNL), Livermore, CA (United States)

Event traces are valuable for understanding the behavior of parallel programs. However, automatically analyzing a large parallel trace is difficult, especially without a specific objective. We aid this endeavor by extracting a trace's logical structure, an ordering of trace events derived from happened-before relationships, while taking into account developer intent. Using this structure, we can calculate an operation's delay relative to its peers on other processes. The logical structure also serves as a platform for comparing and clustering processes as well as highlighting communication patterns in a trace visualization. We present an algorithm for determining this idealized logical structure from traces of message passing programs, and we develop metrics to quantify delays and differences among processes. We implement our techniques in Ravel, a parallel trace visualization tool that displays both logical and physical timelines. Rather than showing the duration of each operation, we display where delays begin and end, and how they propagate. As a result, we apply our approach to the traces of several message passing applications, demonstrating the accuracy of our extracted structure and its utility in analyzing these codes.

Research Organization:
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL), Livermore, CA (United States)
Sponsoring Organization:
USDOE Office of Science (SC), Advanced Scientific Computing Research (ASCR) (SC-21)
Grant/Contract Number:
AC52-07NA27344
OSTI ID:
1410024
Report Number(s):
LLNL-JRNL--668754
Journal Information:
IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems, Journal Name: IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems Journal Issue: 3 Vol. 27; ISSN 1045-9219
Publisher:
IEEECopyright Statement
Country of Publication:
United States
Language:
English

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