COMPLEX PERFORMANCE-MEASUREMENTS WITH NICE (NOTATION FOR INTERVAL COMBINATIONS AND EVENTS)

This paper presents a notation for extracting complex performance meas urements of parallel software from an event log. NICE defines a 'compl ex interval' as a sequence of events in the event log that match a rat her general template using an interval monitor process (IMP). The IMP process model combines an extended FSM with parametrized event descrip tors to provide a generalized description of a sequence of subinterval s each one of which may be measured for duration. An interval matching algorithm provides a strategy for distributing the events in the log to multiple concurrent IMPs, thereby handling interval occurrences tha t overlap and/or share the same event. Practical issues of implementin g and using NICE are addressed in a discussion of our performance moni toring tool called Finale.