Data Centric Performance Measurement Techniques for Chapel Programs

Chapel is an emerging PGAS (Partitioned Global Address Space) language whose design goal is to make parallel programming more productive and generally accessible. To date, the implementation effort has focused primarily on correctness over performance. We present a performance measurement technique for Chapel and the idea is also applicable to other PGAS models. The unique feature of our tool is that it associates the performance statistics not to the code regions (functions), but to the variables (including the heap allocated, static, and local variables) in the source code. Unlike code-centric methods, this data-centric analysis capability exposes new optimization opportunities that are useful in resolving data locality problems. This paper introduces our idea and implementations of the approach with three benchmarks. We also include a case study optimizing benchmarks based on the information from our tool. The optimized versions improved the performance by a factor of 1.4x for LULESH, 2.3x for MiniMD, and 2.1x for CLOMP with simple modifications to the source code.