An Overhead Analysis of MPI Profiling and Tracing Tools

Abstract

MPI performance analysis tools are important instruments for finding performance bottlenecks in large-scale MPI applications. These tools commonly support either the profiling or the tracing of parallel applications. Depending on the type of analysis, the use of such a performance analysis tool may entail a significant runtime overhead on the monitored parallel application. However, overheads can occur in different stages of the performance analysis with varying severity, e.g., the overhead when initializing an MPI context is typically less problematic than when monitoring a high number of short-lived MPI function calls.

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