Crossing Boundaries in TimeTrial: Monitoring Communications across Architecturally Diverse Computing Platforms

Time Trial is a low-impact performance monitor that supports streaming data applications deployed on a variety of architecturally diverse computational platforms, including multicore processors and field-programmable gate arrays. Communication between resources in architecturally diverse systems is frequently a limitation to overall application performance. Understanding these bottlenecks is crucial to understanding overall application performance. Direct measurement of inter-resource communications channel occupancy is not readily achievable without significantly impacting performance of the application itself. Here, we present Time Trial's approach to monitoring those queues that cross platform boundaries. Since the approach includes a combination of direct measurement and modeling, we also describe circumstances under which the model can be shown to be inappropriate. Examples with several micro-benchmark applications (for which the true measurement is known) and an application that uses Monte Carlo techniques to solve Lap lace's equation are used for illustrative purposes.