[email protected] wrote:
> Hi everyone,
> 
> I'm running a COTS beowlulf cluster and I'm using it for CFD simulations with 
> the OpenFOAM code. I'm currently writing a profiling application (a bunch of 
> scripts) in Python that will use the Ganglia-python interface and try to give 
> me an insight into the way machine is burdened during runs. What I'm actually 
> trying to do is to profile the parallel runs of the OpenFOAM solvers. 
> 
> The app will increment the mesh density (the coarsness) of the simulation, 
> and run the simulations increasing the number of cores. Right now the machine 
> is miniscule: two nodes with Quad cores. The app will store the data (timing 
> of the execution, the number of cores) and I will plot the diagrams to see 
> when the case size and the core number is starting to drive the speedup away 
> from the "linear one". 
> 
> Is this a good approach? I know that this will show just tendencies on such 
> an impossible small number of nodes, but I will expand the machine soon, and 
> then their increased number should make these tendencies more accurate. When 
> I cross-reference the temporal data with the system status data given by the 
> ganglia, I can derive conclusions like "O.K., the speedup went down because 
> for the larger cases, the decomposition on max core number was more local, so 
> the system bus must have been burdened, if ganglia confirms that the network 
> is not being strangled for this case configuration".
> 
> Can anyone here tell me if I am at least stepping in the right direction? :) 
> Please, don't say "it depends". 
> 

Have you looked at something like Vampir for MPI profiling? Support for
VampirTrace is built into OpenMPI, if you compile Open MPI wih the
correct options.

The rub is that I think you need to pay for a Vampir GUI to analyze the
data. I've never used it myself, but I saw a demo once, and it looked
pretty powerful.

http://www.vampir.eu/

You might also want to look at Tau, PAPI, and Perfmon2

http://www.cs.uoregon.edu/research/tau/home.php
http://icl.cs.utk.edu/papi/
http://perfmon2.sourceforge.net/

I set this up for one of my users a couple of years ago. I could be
wrong, but I think Tau requires PAPI, and PAPI in turn requires the
perfmon2 kernel patches. I could be wrong, since it's been a couple of
years. Reading the docs above should point you in the correct direction.

That's probably more than you wanted to know.



-- 
Prentice
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