Non-intrusive Performance Analysis of Parallel Hardware Accelerated Applications on Hybrid Architectures

Abstract

New high performance computing (HPC) applications recently have to face scalability over an increasing number of nodes and the programming of special accelerator hardware. Hybrid composition of large computing systems leads to a new dimension in complexity of software development. This paper presents a novel approach to gain insight into accelerator interaction and utilization without any changes to the application. It leverages well established methods for performance analysis to accelerator hardware, allowing a holistic view on performance bottlenecks of hybrid applications. A general strategy is presented to get dynamic runtime information about hybrid program execution with minimal impact on the program ???ow. The achievable level of detail is exemplarily studied for the CUDA environment and the OpenCL framework. Combined with existing performance analysis techniques this facilitates obtaining the full potential of hybrid computing power.