PAPS - A TESTBED FOR PERFORMANCE PREDICTION OF PARALLEL APPLICATIONS

The PAPS (Performance Analysis of Parallel Systems) toolset is a testb ed for the model based performance prediction of message passing paral lel applications executed on private memory multiprocessor computer sy stems. PAPS allows to describe the execution behavior of the computer hardware and operating system software resources up to a very detailed level. This enables very accurate performance prediction of parallel applications even in the case of substantial performance degradation d ue to contention for shared resources. In this paper the fundamental d esign principles and implementation methodologies for the development of the PAPS toolset are presented and the PAPS parallel system specifi cation formalisms are described. A simplified performance study of a p arallel Gaussian elimination application on the nCUBE 2 multiprocessor system is used to demonstrate the usage of the tool.