Visualizing massively multithreaded applications with ThreadScope

As highly parallel multicore machines become commonplace, programs must exhibit more concurrency to exploit the available hardware. Many multithreaded programming models already encourage programmers to create hundreds or thousands of short‐lived threads that interact in complex ways. Programmers ne...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published in:Concurrency and computation Vol. 22; no. 1; pp. 45 - 67
Main Authors: Wheeler, Kyle B., Thain, Douglas
Format: Journal Article
Language:English
Published: Chichester, UK John Wiley & Sons, Ltd 01.01.2010
Subjects:
C (programming language)
Concurrency
Hardware
Mathematical models
multithreading
Programmers
structure
Synchronism
Synchronization
visualization
ISSN:1532-0626, 1532-0634
Online Access:Get full text
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary:As highly parallel multicore machines become commonplace, programs must exhibit more concurrency to exploit the available hardware. Many multithreaded programming models already encourage programmers to create hundreds or thousands of short‐lived threads that interact in complex ways. Programmers need to be able to analyze, tune, and troubleshoot these large‐scale multithreaded programs. To address this problem, we present ThreadScope: a tool for tracing, visualizing, and analyzing massively multithreaded programs. ThreadScope extracts the machine‐independent program structure from execution trace data from a variety of tracing tools and displays it as a graph of dependent execution blocks and memory objects, enabling identification of synchronization and structural problems, even if they did not occur in the traced run. It also uses graph‐based analysis to identify potential problems. We demonstrate the use of ThreadScope to view program structure, memory access patterns, and synchronization problems in three programming environments and seven applications. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Bibliography:Sandia National Laboratories - No. DE-AC04-94AL85000
istex:8F16EEE9E51BAEBBD487074ED16D44A63FD84669
ArticleID:CPE1469
ark:/67375/WNG-PD34G8GQ-2
ObjectType-Article-2
SourceType-Scholarly Journals-1
ObjectType-Feature-1
content type line 23
ISSN:1532-0626
1532-0634
DOI:10.1002/cpe.1469