Parallelism-centric what-if and differential analyses

Abstract

This paper proposes TaskProf2, a parallelism profiler and an adviser for task parallel programs. As a parallelism profiler, TaskProf2 pinpoints regions with serialization bottlenecks, scheduling overheads, and secondary effects of execution. As an adviser, TaskProf2 identifies regions that matter in improving parallelism. To accomplish these objectives, it uses a performance model that captures series-parallel relationships between various dynamic execution fragments of tasks and includes fine-grained measurement of computation in those fragments. Using this performance model, TaskProf2’s what-if analyses identify regions that improve the parallelism of the program while considering tasking overheads. Its differential analyses perform fine-grained differencing of an oracle and the observed performance model to identify static regions experiencing secondary effects. We have used TaskProf2 to identify regions with serialization bottlenecks and secondary effects in many applications.