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Observation Tools and Techniques

Observation tools and techniques provide timing measurements of parallel system behavior. Depending on their purpose, these measurements may be grouped by their location (i.e., source code or processor), operation (e.g., send, receive, barrier), or data structure accessed. These measurements can be performed at various levels of abstraction as follows:

Summary statistics
provide high-level performance characteristics, such as running time or the number of messages exchanged.

Execution events
capture detailed performance data about individual operations, such as the time to send a single message or complete a synchronization operation.

Abstract events
express performance behavior at a level higher than execution events. Abstract events are determined by grouping many execution events and analyzing their meaning. Examples of abstract events are load imbalance and insufficient parallelism.

In the sections that follow we discuss each of these approaches in more detail.





Wagner Meira
Wed Feb 28 15:37:47 EST 1996