Extensible Parallel Program Performance Visualization

Performance bugs have classically been difficult to identify in high performance programs. The problem arises because there is a broad spectrum of causes of performance degradation, and because it may be necessary to apply specialized diagnostics to search the performance space. The prototype tuning environment we are developing enables one to explore the performance space of a program using customized performance visualization techniques. It addresses the breadth problem by providing tools known to be useful for broad explorations, tools for inspecting specific performance bugs, and an ability to extend the observation platform by custom analysis and visualization. This paper describes the ParaVision tool that enables one to integrate various PICL-based performance tools into a single user environment.