An Open-Source Tool-Chain for Performance Analysis

Modern supercomputers with multi-core nodes enhanced by accelerators, as well as hybrid programming models, introduce more complexity in modern applications. Efficiently Exploiting all of the available resources requires a complex performance analysis of applications in order to detect time-consuming or idle sections. This paper presents an open-source tool-chain for analyzing the performance of parallel applications. It is composed of a trace generation framework called EZTRACE, a generic interface for writing traces in multipe format called GTG, and a trace visualizer called VITE. These tools cover the main steps of performance analysis – from the instrumentation of applications to the trace analysis – and are designed to maximize the compatibility with other performance analysis tools. Thus, these tools support multiple file formats and are not bound to a particular programming model. The evaluation of these tools show that they provide similar performance compared to other analysis tools, while being generic.