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Performance Feedback

Using The Temanejo Task Debugger

StarPU can connect to Temanejo >= 1.0rc2 (see http://www.hlrs.de/temanejo), to permit nice visual task debugging. To do so, build Temanejo's libayudame.so, install Ayudame.h to e.g. /usr/local/include, apply the tools/patch-ayudame to it to fix C build, re-./configure, make sure that it found it, rebuild StarPU. Run the Temanejo GUI, give it the path to your application, any options you want to pass it, the path to libayudame.so.

Make sure to specify at least the same number of CPUs in the dialog box as your machine has, otherwise an error will happen during execution. Future versions of Temanejo should be able to tell StarPU the number of CPUs to use.

Tag numbers have to be below 4000000000000000000ULL to be usable for Temanejo (so as to distinguish them from tasks).

On-line Performance Feedback

Enabling On-line Performance Monitoring

In order to enable online performance monitoring, the application can call starpu_profiling_status_set() with the parameter STARPU_PROFILING_ENABLE. It is possible to detect whether monitoring is already enabled or not by calling starpu_profiling_status_get(). Enabling monitoring also reinitialize all previously collected feedback. The environment variable STARPU_PROFILING can also be set to 1 to achieve the same effect. The function starpu_profiling_init() can also be called during the execution to reinitialize performance counters and to start the profiling if the environment variable STARPU_PROFILING is set to 1.

Likewise, performance monitoring is stopped by calling starpu_profiling_status_set() with the parameter STARPU_PROFILING_DISABLE. Note that this does not reset the performance counters so that the application may consult them later on.

More details about the performance monitoring API are available in Profiling.

Per-task Feedback

If profiling is enabled, a pointer to a structure starpu_profiling_task_info is put in the field starpu_task::profiling_info when a task terminates. This structure is automatically destroyed when the task structure is destroyed, either automatically or by calling starpu_task_destroy().

The structure starpu_profiling_task_info indicates the date when the task was submitted (starpu_profiling_task_info::submit_time), started (starpu_profiling_task_info::start_time), and terminated (starpu_profiling_task_info::end_time), relative to the initialization of StarPU with starpu_init(). It also specifies the identifier of the worker that has executed the task (starpu_profiling_task_info::workerid). These date are stored as timespec structures which the user may convert into micro-seconds using the helper function starpu_timing_timespec_to_us().

It it worth noting that the application may directly access this structure from the callback executed at the end of the task. The structure starpu_task associated to the callback currently being executed is indeed accessible with the function starpu_task_get_current().

Per-codelet Feedback

The field starpu_codelet::per_worker_stats is an array of counters. The i-th entry of the array is incremented every time a task implementing the codelet is executed on the i-th worker. This array is not reinitialized when profiling is enabled or disabled.

Per-worker Feedback

The second argument returned by the function starpu_profiling_worker_get_info() is a structure starpu_profiling_worker_info that gives statistics about the specified worker. This structure specifies when StarPU started collecting profiling information for that worker (starpu_profiling_worker_info::start_time), the duration of the profiling measurement interval (starpu_profiling_worker_info::total_time), the time spent executing kernels (starpu_profiling_worker_info::executing_time), the time spent sleeping because there is no task to execute at all (starpu_profiling_worker_info::sleeping_time), and the number of tasks that were executed while profiling was enabled. These values give an estimation of the proportion of time spent do real work, and the time spent either sleeping because there are not enough executable tasks or simply wasted in pure StarPU overhead.

Calling starpu_profiling_worker_get_info() resets the profiling information associated to a worker.

When an FxT trace is generated (see Generating Traces With FxT), it is also possible to use the tool starpu_workers_activity (see Monitoring Activity) to generate a graphic showing the evolution of these values during the time, for the different workers.

Bus-related Feedback

TODO: ajouter STARPU_BUS_STATS