A performance monitor for the MSPARC multicomputer

Abstract

A hybrid performance monitor developed for MSPARC, a mesh-connected, message-passing multicomputer, is described. The development of the hybrid performance monitor was a cross-disciplinary enterprise requiring custom hardware and a range of software support including monitor code, driver interfaces, probe history acquisition and processing, graphical display, and application probe injection. Programmable hardware was designed to unobtrusively collect events on each node and maintain their accurate chronological order. This distributed collection system was coupled by its independent network to a central monitor where data selection and presentation techniques played an important role in the visualization of the parallel system's execution.<>