A Performance Analysis Framework For C/C++ and Fortran

Wyatt Spear (University of Oregon)

Test And Performance · Short Talk

Wednesday, 15:40, 10 minutes | Room 209/210 |

Wyatt Spear

For many programming projects, especially those pertaining to high performance or parallel computing, performance analysis and tuning is very important. The PTP (Parallel Tools Platform) project's goal of supporting parallel application development within Eclipse necessitated the inclusion of tools for the performance analysis component of the development cycle. Initially this need was met by a plugin which provided an Eclipse-based interface for the TAU (Tuning and Analysis Utilities) performance analysis system. The plugin encapsulated the robust performance analysis capabilities of TAU, rather than necessitating the development of a new tool specifically for Eclipse. However, the TAU plugin was only able to provide access to the capabilities of one tool amongst a diverse array of performance tools with their own specialties and user-bases. The tools available for performance analysis of C/C++ and Fortran applications have traditionally been command line based. Many such tools are complicated to use and few share common interface elements. A simple, unified interface for performance analysis tools provided via Eclipse stands to simplify a major component of high performance application development. To achieve this end we took the original TAU plugin and extended and generalized it to support arbitrary performance analysis applications. The generalization of support for performance analysis tools lead directly to a system sufficiently flexible to allow more complex tool work-flows to be defined by the user and selected, configured and executed from within Eclipse. This talk will feature a demonstration of the definition and execution of a performance tool work-flow. It will present performance analysis elements integrated into Eclipse supplemental to the performance tool framework. It will also provide an overview of features for future development.

Wyatt Spear has been employed at the University of Oregon's Performance Research Lab since 2004. His work there has focused on developing tools and utilities, along with Eclipse integration, for the TAU performance analysis system. He holds a B.S. and M.S. in Computer and Information Science from the University of Oregon.