An Introduction to the Layered Characterisation for High Performance Systems

A toolset for performance analysis of parallel systems, PACE, is presented in this report. In this toolset expert knowledge about the performance evaluation techniques is not required as a prerequisite for the user. Instead a declarative approach to the performance study is taken by describing the application in a way that is both intuitive to the user, but can also be used to obtain performance results. The underlying performance related characterisation models and their evaluation processes are hidden from the user. This document describes the special purpose language, and the evaluation system, that form the core of the PACE toolset. Amongst the aims of the toolset is the support of characterisation model reusability, ease of experimentation, provide different levels of prediction accuracy, and support of different levels of characterisation model abstraction.