Users of Alliance Origin2000 Systems
Get Early Look at Tool for Memory Analysis
It's 11 PM. Do you know where your memory pages are?
NCSA's Performance Engineering and Computational Methods (PECM) team,
part of the Scientific Computing Division, would like to help you find out.
During the successful Origin2000 Capability Computing Conference held
at NCSA in late spring 1999, several high-end users of the center's
Origin2000 observed that tools were needed to analyze memory placement
patterns on this distributed shared-memory supercomputer. Such tools
would help them understand and improve the performance of their applications.
PECM's Rick Kufrin agreed and set about developing such a tool, which he
calls the Memory Placement Monitor (MPM).
MPM graphically displays the placement of memory pages of shared-memory
applications on the nodes of the Origin. This
lets you gain further insight into the interaction of your
applications, the operating system, the compiler, and the Origin hardware.
MPM can also collect profiling data on the actual memory usage
pattern of your application as well, allowing you to see, on a thread-by-thread
basis, which memory locations were read and written during the course
of a run.
MPM 1.0 is currently in a beta release, and Kufrin invites
users of NCSA's Origin array to help test the tool on their
applications. He is also working with colleagues at Boston University,
an Alliance Partners for Advanced Computational Services
(PACS) site operating an Origin2000, to make the tool available
to selected users for beta testing.
NCSA users should send
feedback to Kufrin.
The
MPM website
offers a Getting Started guide as part of the release.
MPM works on both UNIX and Windows 9x/NT platforms. A future issue of
data link will include information about the final release of MPM.
Fine Print and Related Information
MPM is available free of charge to academic users. Terms for commercial use of the
tool are currently being developed.
PECM team members provide support to high-end computational users to help them
achieve high performance on Alliance supercomputers. Their activities include
a reference guide to NCSA compiler, performance, and productivity tools.
