SC 740 Presentation Review

 By Deborah Dent

 Paradyn Parallel Performance Tools

Presented by

Oscar Naim

Computer Sciences Department

University of Wisconsin

September 17, 1997

Dr. Naim presented a very interesting talk on a software performance tool, Paradyn. Paradyn, which evolved from a set of performance tools developed at the University of Wisconsin, operates successfully on various platforms such as Suns, Crays and other. It is a commercial product used by educational institutions, private industry, and the government for diagnosing performance problems mainly in large programs.

Dr. Naim pointed out that traditional methods of monitoring and diagnosing performance issues can be quite expensive and very time consuming. The beauty of this product is its ability to do everything dynamically. The user does not have to add code to his existing program, does not have to recompile the existing code or re-link it. When he made these statements, my curiosity went wild! He stated that Paradyn could "on the fly", insert, remove and change instrumentation in the application program while it is running. This I have to see!

After presenting an architectural overview of the system, Dr. Naim gave an overview of the procedures and processes needed to successfully use this product. He explained the command set needed to run Paradyn but comically steered away from displaying examples of the code. After examining the handout, I can see that the instruction set for Paradyn could take some getting used to.

The results of using this product will answer these questions for a user:

Why is the program running slowly?

Where in the program is this occurring?

When does the problem occur?

These questions can now be answered via an automated process. Having personally experienced having to address these exact questions, in a fielded system, I can appreciate an automated method of pointing to the problems so that one can fix them. (Maybe he will automate the correction process next.)

The current research areas:

Operating System Kernel Dynamic Instrumentation

Experiment Management

Profiling of Interpretive and Compile-on-Demand Code

Profiling of Memory and Cache Behavior

Parallel I/O Profiling

Shared-memory dynamic instrumentation (Per thread Instrumentation)

are truly interesting and worth monitoring closely. Especially the Operating System Kernel Dynamic Instrumentation. I can see the development of a tool to "on the fly" modify operating system kernel as a powerful tool but also as Dr. Paprzycki pointed out, dangerous if the technology ends up in the wrong hands.