IO Profiling of Applications: MPI Apps

“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.”

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