Incremental Monitoring on Programmable Network Interface Cards

Monitoring of program behavior is a basic necessity for performance tuning and debugging. A major problem is the overhead associated with the monitoring tasks, which influences the program’s behavior and affects the observation results. At the same time, a certain amount of data is needed for the program analysis activities. For this reason, monitoring approaches have to balance the amount of overhead with the amount of extracted information. The proposed incremental monitoring approach provides a solution implemented to run on programmable network interface cards (Myrinet), which perturbs the program’s execution as little as possible1. The resulting data is then used to control the program during subsequent executions, while at the same time incrementally increasing the amount of monitoring. With this multistep approach, any amount of trace data can be extracted without substantial intrusions onto the program’s execution.