Online Performance Data Introspection with IPM

Exascale systems will be heterogeneous architectures with multiple levels of concurrency and energy constraints. In such a complex scenario, performance monitoring and runtime systems play a major role to obtain good application performance and scalability. Furthermore, online access to performance data becomes a necessity to decide how to schedule resources and orchestrate computational elements: processes, threads, tasks, etc. We present the Performance Introspection API, an extension of the IPM tool that provides online runtime access to performance data from an application while it runs. We describe its design and implementation and show its overhead on several test benchmarks. We also present a real test case using the Performance Introspection API in conjunction with processor frequency scaling to reduce power consumption.QC 20140602