Experiment Management Support for Performance Tuning

The development of a high performance parallel system or application is an evolutionary process -- both the code and the environment go through many changes during a program's lifetime -- and at each change, a key question for developers is: how and how much did the performance change? No existing performance tool provides the necessary functionality to answer this question. We report on the design and preliminary implementation of a tool that views each execution as a scientific experiment and provides the functionality to answer questions about a program's performance that span more than a single execution or environment.