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ABSTRACT

Our goal in this work was to identify and quantify the overheads of tracing parallel applications. We investigate several different sources of overhead related to tracing: trace instrumentation, periodic writing of trace files to disk, differing trace buffer sizes, system changes, and increasing numbers of processors in the target application. We encountered overheads as large as 26.7% for writing the trace file to disk. We found that buffer sizes can make a difference in the overheads, and that differences in system software can also contribute to the level of the perturbation. Our results show that the overhead of instrumentation correlates strongly with the number of events, while the overhead of writing the trace buffer increases with increasing numbers of processors.

REFERENCES

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INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  C. Computer Systems Organization
  C.4 PERFORMANCE OF SYSTEMS
      Subjects: Measurement techniques

Additional Classification:
  C. Computer Systems Organization
  C.4 PERFORMANCE OF SYSTEMS
      Subjects: Performance attributes

General Terms:
Measurement, Performance

Keywords:
measurement perturbation, parallel performance measurement, parallel performance tools, tracing overhead