Performance Measurement Using Low Perturbation and High Precision Hardware Assists

Published

December 3, 1998

Author(s)

Alan Mink, Wayne J. Salamon, J Hollingsworth, R Arunachalam

Abstract

We present the design and implementation of MultiKron PCI, a hardware performance monitor that can be plugged into any computer with a free PCI bus slot. The monitor provides a series of high-resolution timers, and the ability to monitor the utilization of the PCI bus. We also demonstrate how the monitor can be integrated with on-line performance monitoring tools such as the Paradyn parallel performance measurement tools to improve the overhead of key timer operations by a factor of 25. In addition, we present a series of case studies using the MultiKron hardware performance monitor to measure and tune high-performance parallel computing applications. By using the monitor, we were able to find and correct a performance bug in a popular implementation of the MPI message passing library that caused some communication primitives to run at one half of their potential speed.

Proceedings Title

19th IEEE Real-Time Systems Symposium proceedings : RTSS '97

Conference Dates

December 2-4, 1998

Conference Location

Madrid, SP

Conference Title

Real-Time Systems Symposium

Pub Type

Conferences

Keywords

distributed computing, measurement hardware, parallel computing, performance measurement, performance monitor, performance tools

Citation

Mink, A. , Salamon, W. , Hollingsworth, J. and Arunachalam, R. (1998), Performance Measurement Using Low Perturbation and High Precision Hardware Assists, 19th IEEE Real-Time Systems Symposium proceedings : RTSS '97, Madrid, SP (Accessed October 10, 2025)