Shared Memory Performance Profiling

Abstract

This paper describes a new approach to finding performance bottlenecks in shared-memory parallel programs and its embodiment in the Paradyn Parallel Performance Tools running with the Blizzard fine-grain distributed shared memory system. This approach exploits the underlying system's cache coherence protocol to detect data sharing patterns that indicate potential performance bottlenecks and presents performance measurements in a data-centric manner. As a demonstration, Parodyn helped us improve the performance of a new shared-memory application program by a factor of four.