Critical Path Analysis for the Execution of Parallel and Distributed Programs

This paper presents the design, implementation and testing of the critical path analysis technique on the IPS performance measurement tool for parallel and distributed programs. We create a precedence graph of a program’s activities (Program Activity Graph) with the data collected during the execution of a program. The critical path, the longest path in the program activity graph, represents the sequence of the program activities that take the longest time to execute. Various algorithms are developed to track the critical path from this graph. The events in this path are associated with the entities in the source program and the statistical results are displayed based on the hierarchical structure of the IPS. The test results from the measurement of sample programs show that the knowledge of the critical path in a program’s execution helps users identify performance problems and better understand the behavior of a program.