Specification of Inefficiency Patterns for MPI-2 One-Sided Communication

Automatic performance analysis of parallel programs can be accomplished by scanning event traces of program execution for patterns representing inefficient behavior. The temporal and spatial relationships between individual runtime events recorded in the event trace allow the recognition of wait states as a result of suboptimal parallel interaction. In our earlier work [1], we have shown how patterns related to MPI point-to-point and collective communication can be easily specified using common abstractions that represent execution-state information and links between related events. In this article, we present new abstractions targeting remote memory access (also referred to as one-sided communication) as defined in the MPI-2 standard. We also describe how the general structure of these abstractions differs from our earlier work to accommodate the more complicated sequence of data-transfer and synchronization operations required for this type of communication. To demonstrate the benefits of our methodology, we specify typical performance properties related to one-sided communication.