B.J.N.: Large event traces in parallel performance analysis

A powerful and widely-used method for analyzing the performance behavior of parallel programs is event tracing. When an application is traced, performance-relevant events, such as entering functions or sending messages, are recorded at run-time and analyzed post-mortem to identify and potentially remove performance prob-lems. While event tracing enables the detection of performance problems at a high level of detail, growing trace-file size often constrains its scalability on large-scale systems and complicates management, analysis, and visualization of trace data. In this article, we survey current approaches to handle large traces and classify them accord-ing to the primary issues they address and the primary benefits they offer