Portable execution traces for parallel program debugging and performance visualization

Abstract

There is much interest in defining a standard for event traces collected from parallel architectures. A standard would support free data and tool sharing among researchers working on varied architectures. But defining that standard has proved to be difficult. Any standard must allow user-defined events and avoid or hide event semantics as much as possible. The authors propose a standard based on a declaration language, which describes how the raw event trace is to be translated into a normal form. Analysis tools then share a common interface to a compiler and interpreter which use the declarations to fetch, transform, and augment trace data. This concept is evaluated through construction of a prototype declaration compiler and interpreter.<>