Detecting Runtime Environment Interference with Parallel Application Behavior

Many performance problems observed in high end systems are actually caused by the runtime system and not the application code. Detecting these cases require parallel performance tools to incorporate information about the runtime system; however many current tools do not. We present a test suite for evaluating the ability of performance tools to reach correct diagnosis in cases where a problem is caused by the runtime environment. We include a set of results for one of the tests, which measures application performance as NFS server load is increased. We also present a model for performance diagnosis that combines system and application level information.