A software instrumentation technique for performance tuning of message-passing programs

A major problem with collecting trace data for performance monitoring is its intrusiveness to the program being monitored. It sometimes distorts the run-time behaviour of the program so that the collected data become irrelevant to its original program. We proposed a new technique, called the postponing technique, to maintain the original program behaviour in order to collect accurate performance data. It preserves event orders by equalling the instrumentation delay for each pair of communication events. This technique does not extend the execution time taken by the conventional approach and is able to estimate the original event ordering. Our technique was implemented on a Connection Machine, CM-5. We find that the technique estimates more accurate event ordering information than the conventional technique.<
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