GASP! A Standardized Performance Analysis Tool Interface for Global Address Space Programming Models

The global address space (GAS) programming model provides important potential productivity advantages over traditional parallel programming models. Languages using the GAS model currently have insufficient support from existing performance analysis tools, due in part to their implementation complexity. We have designed the Global Address Space Performance (GASP) tool interface that is flexible enough to support instrumentation of any GAS programming model implementation, while simultaneously allowing existing performance analysis tools to leverage their tool's infrastructure and quickly add support for programming languages and libraries using the GAS model. To evaluate the effectiveness of this interface, the tracing and profiling overhead of a preliminary Berkeley UPC GASP implementation is measured and found to be within the acceptable range