Ubiquitous Performance Analysis

In an effort to guide optimizations and detect performance regressions, developers of large HPC codes must regularly collect and analyze application performance profiles across different hardware platforms and in a variety of program configurations. However, traditional performance profiling tools mostly focus on ad-hoc analysis of individual program runs. Ubiquitous performance analysis is a new approach to automate and simplify the collection, management, and analysis of large numbers of application performance profiles. In this regime, performance profiling of large HPC codes transitions from a sporadic process that often requires the help of experts into a routine activity in which the entire development team can participate. We discuss the design and implementation of an open source ubiquitous performance analysis software stack with three major components: the Caliper instrumentation library with a new API to control performance profiling programmatically; Adiak, a library for automatic program metadata capture; and SPOT, a web-based visualization interface for comparing large sets of runs. A case study shows how ubiquitous performance analysis has helped the developers of the Marbl simulation code for over a year with analyzing performance and understanding regressions.