Performance Visualization on Monsoon

The performance of an applications program running on a parallel machine is affected by several factors such as the algorithm, the programming language, the compiler and the operating system. Performance evaluation of parallel machines requires quick and easy-to-use analysis of large amounts of data. This paper describes a performance evaluation tool built for Monsoon, a multithreaded multiprocessor machine built by Motorola in collaboration with MIT. The tool offers integrated data collection, analysis and visualization and is designed to be simple but powerful. Software layers built on top of simple hardware monitors offers a flexible, yet non-intrusive performance evaluation tool. Examples of successful use of the tool by both systems and applications programmers are included. 1 Introduction Computer systems are becoming increasingly complex, making it harder to understand their performance behavior and more difficult to get near optimal performance [9]. Performance analysis tools a..