Execution Architecture Independent Program Tracing University of Colorado at Boulder Execution Architecture Independent Program Tracing

Due to dramatic increases in microprocessor performance, medium-grain ensemble multi-processors have become an economical hardware platform on which to solve compute-intensive problems. Unfortunately, the use of these systems to solve such problems is hampered by a lack of understanding about the behavior of parallel programs at all levels of execution | hardware, operating system, and runtime system. The goal of the Parallel Execution Evaluation Testbed project at the University of Colorado is to improve the general understanding about the performance of parallel programs and systems at these levels using trace-driven simulation. In this paper, we discuss the validity of trace-driven simulation of parallel programs, the diiculties of applying this approach to evaluating parallel programs, and a new technique to abstract the logical behavior of the program and capture it in the traces we collect. We describe how this abstract trace information can be used to understand the behavior of parallel systems.