Profiling and Tracing Tools for Performance Analysis of Large Scale Applications

The usage of modern profiling and tracing tools is vital for understanding program behaviour, performance bottlenecks and optimisation potentials in HPC applications. Despite their obvious benefits, such tools are still not that widely adopted within the HPC user community. The two main reasons for this are firstly unawareness and secondly the sometimes inhibitive complexity of getting started with these tools. In this work we aim to address this issue by presenting and comparing the capabilities of four different performance analysis tools, which are 1) HPCToolkit, 2) Extrae and Paraver, 3) SCALASCA and 4) the Intel Trace Analyzer and Collector (ITAC). The practical usage of these tools is demonstrated based on case studies on the widely used molecular dynamics simulation code GROMACS.