"In the last article we looked at using strace to examine the IO patterns of simple serial applications. In the High Performance Computing (HPC) world, applications use MPI (Message Passing Interface) to create parallel applications. This time around we discuss how to attack parallel applications using strace.
"Strace is one of the those all-purpose tools that can be used for debugging problems on your system(s). It can also be used for digging into the IO profile of applications - even if you don’t have the source code (but with Linux you should always have access to the source). In the last article it was shown how strace can be used to gather a great deal of information about the IO behavior of applications.
"The reason that strace can be useful is because IO is performed using libraries on Linux (for the vast majority of applications). Because of this strace can record the information of the specific system call (syscall) in a form that is very useful."
