StarVZ: Performance Analysis of Task-Based Parallel Applications

High-performance computing (HPC) applications enable the solution of compute-intensive problems in feasible time. Among many HPC paradigms, task-based programming has gathered community attention in recent years. This paradigm enables constructing an HPC application using a more declarative approach, structuring it in a direct acyclic graph (DAG). The performance evaluation of these applications is as hard as in any other programming paradigm. Understanding how to analyze these applications, employing the DAG and runtime metrics, presents opportunities to improve its performance. This article describes the StarVZ R-package available on CRAN for performance analysis of task-based applications. StarVZ enables transforms runtime trace data into different vi-sualizations of the application behavior. An analyst can understand their applications' performance limitations and compare multiple executions. StarVZ has been successfully applied to several study-cases, showing its applicability in a number of scenarios