2007 News & Highlights

• At the recent Dagstuhl Workshop on "Code Instrumentation and Modeling for Parallel Performance Analysis", Rainer Keller of the Universitat of Stuttgart presented a demo of Open MPI and Paraver. Open MPI is an open source MPI-2 implementation and Paraver is an advanced visualization tool capable of presenting detailed information from raw performance traces.
• Thanks are due to Rainer Keller for providing this tracefile of a simple application running on a PERUSE enabled version of Open MPI. With Paraver, the PERUSE-enabled MPI is able to provided quantitative low-level activity within the MPI as seen here.
• Also at the recent Dagstuhl workshop, Terry Jones gave a presentation entitled Peering Inside Black Boxes: Strategies for Uncovering Scaling Issues In Lower Software Stack Levels". This presentation discusses strategies for deciphering what is happening within lower software stack levels. The talk includes detail on one such strategy, the PERUSE api for examining MPI.
• Aniruddha Shet and P. Sadayappan of the Ohio State University and David Bernholdt of ORNL have developed a framework to characterize computation-communication overlap for parallel applications on message-passing systems (see paper). They are currently reviewing PERUSE for its potential in this regard, and may be able to propose a few alterations which would make PERUSE more suited for such efforts.