The Integration of Application and System Based Metrics in a Parallel Program Performance Tool

The IPS-2 parallel program measurement tools provide performance data from application programs, the operating system, hardware, network, and other sources. Previous versions of IPS-2 allowed programmers to collect information about an application based only on what could be collected by software instrumentation inserted into the program (and system call libraries). We have developed an open interface, called the "external time histogram", providing a graceful way to include external data from many sources. The user can tell IPS-2 of new sources of performance data through an extensible metric description language. The data from these external sources is automatically collected when the application program is run. IPS-2 provides a library to simplify constructing the external data collectors. The new version of IPS-2 can measure sharedmemory and message-passing parallel programs running on a heterogeneous collection of machines. Data from C or Fortran programs, and data from simulation..