PerfMiner: Cluster-Wide Collection, Storage and Presentation of Application Level Hardware Performance Data

Abstract. We present PerfMiner, a system for the transparent collection, storage and presentation of thread-level hardware performance data across an entire cluster. Every sub-process/thread spawned by the user through the batch system is measured with near zero overhead and no dilation of run-time. Performance metrics are collected at the thread level using tool built on top of the Performance Application Programming Interface (PAPI). As the hardware counters are virtualized by the OS, the resulting counts are largely unaffected by other kernel or user processes. PerfMiner correlates this performance data with metadata from the batch system and places it in a database. Through a command line and web interface, the user can make queries to the database to report information on everything from overall workload characterization and system utilization to the performance of a single thread in a specific application. This is in contrast to other monitoring systems that report aggregate sy...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2005
• Where: EUROPAR
• Authors: Philip Mucci, Daniel Ahlin, Johan Danielsson, Per Ekman, Lars Malinowski
• Keywords: EUROPAR 2005, Performance Application Programming Interface, Performance Data, Thread-level Hardware Performance