Crossing Timezones in the TimeTrial Performance Monitor

TimeTrial is a performance monitoring tool designed to enhance the understanding of how and why a streaming data application is performing when deployed on an architecturally diverse computer. A challenge that exists in architecturally diverse systems is that different computing platforms (e.g., processor core, FPGA) have different clocks, and the notion of time as measured on one platform does not directly compare to that measured on another platform. Here, we describe the global time model employed in the TimeTrial performance monitor, and demonstrate measurements made with TimeTrial that require timestamp comparisons across the disparate time domains (called timezones).