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5 Generating Trace Data

While the profile data visualizations from the previous section are very useful in finding general performance problems in your application, trace data can be used to troubleshoot detailed performance problems that profile statistics may gloss over. Trace data can be thought of as a “log” of all program activity, in that events are recorded at runtime and are annotated with globally-synchronized timestamps. One of the more useful things you can do with trace data is export it to a timeline viewer such as Jumpshot or Vampir, so you can see exactly what is going on at a particular point in time during execution.

In order to get PPW to generate trace data, give the --trace to ppwrun, as in:

     $ ppwrun --trace --output=is-trace.B.par srun -N 32 is.B.32

If you are collecting trace data to view with the Jumpshot timeline viewer, we suggest compiling without using the ‘--inst-functions’ flag, as the amount of information being displayed can quickly become overwhelming, and excluding function calls from trace files can significantly reduce their size. This is entirely a personal preference, however, so you might experiment with your particular application to see which you prefer.

It is important to mention that one of the major drawbacks to tracing is that if left unchecked, trace file sizes can grow to become very large and unmanageable. Unfortunately, PPW currently does not have any fancy tricks for dealing with such large data files. We recommend that you trace your application only after identifying specific performance problems with a profile (as in the previous sections), and use the techniques outlined in Tweaking Instrumentation and Measurement to cut down on the amount of data being collected.

The remainder of this tutorial will focus on analyzing trace data from our IS benchmark using the Jumpshot timeline viewer, which is free and comes bundled with PPW. To view trace data with Jumpshot, you first must open a PAR data file containing trace records (eg, run with the --trace option) with the PPW GUI, then choose “Export... SLOG-2” from the main menu. Choose a file in which to save the exported data (give it an extension of .slog2), then open up the newly-created SLOG-2 file with the Jumpshot viewer. If you have a working Java installation on your parallel machine, you can also use the command-line program par2slog2 to do the conversion, as in

     $ par2slog2 is-trace.B.par is-trace.slog2

This trace conversion process is CPU- and disk-intensive and may take a while for larger trace files.

In addition to the SLOG-2 trace format, PPW also supports exporting trace data to the OTF trace format, which is supported by newer versions of Vampir and the very cool Vampir-NG tool. For more information on these trace viewers, visit the Vampir website.