Critical Path Profiling of Message Passing and Shared-Memory Programs

—In this paper, we introduce a runtime, nontrace-based algorithm to compute the critical path profile of the execution of message passing and shared-memory parallel programs. Our algorithm permits starting or stopping the critical path computation during program execution and reporting intermediate values. We also present an online algorithm to compute a variant of critical path, called critical path zeroing, that measures the reduction in application execution time that improving a selected procedure will have. Finally, we present a brief case study to quantify the runtime overhead of our algorithm and to show that online critical path profiling can be used to find program bottlenecks.

• Type: Journal
• Year: 1998
• Where: TPDS
• Authors: Jeffrey K. Hollingsworth
• Keywords: Algorithm, Critical Path, Critical Path Profile, TPDS 1998