PTLIB Review of Paragraph
See the PTLIB Review of Parallel Debuggers and
Performance Analyzers which includes this evaluation of Paradyn
for the review criteria and methodology as well as a comparison
with other similar tools.
Performance
- Acceptable monitoring overhead
- N/A
- Acceptable response time
- Response time is very good.
- Memory/disk requirements
- It takes up very little disk space and memory.
- Scalable data collection
- N/A
- Scalable data presentation
- Yes, you can zoom in or out using a variety of graphs.
Versatility
- Languages/programming models/
communication libaries supported
- Runs on currently popular platforms
- Yes, runs on most systems
- Platform dependencies isolated
- No.
- Support for heterogeneous environment
- Not applicable.
- Interacts with current or soon-to-be
standards (e.g., PVM, MPI, HPF)
- It supports the PICL trace format. So PVM and MPI are supported
indirectly.
- Uses SDDF
- No.
- Change/customize/add new views easily
- No.
Ease of Use
- Documentation
- Documentation is good and concise but I would have liked to see a
tutorial.
- Ease of installation
Installation is very easy. You unpack the file you get by executing
the file which will unpack it into the dir. Then you go into the
dir and make with the makefile of your particular architecture.
- Command-line interface
- N/A
- Window-based interface
- Yes.
- GUI common look-and-feel (OSF/Motif Style Guide)
- Yes.
- Privilege-free installation
- Yes
- Reports information at source code level
- No.
- Automated instrumentation
- N/A
Maturity
- Runs without crashing the monitored program
- N/A
- Reports and recovers from error conditions
- Yes.
- Support
Capabilities
- Support for multiple threads per node
- Presents different levels of abstraction,
from global to individual threads,
procedures, or data structures
- Yes, through the different graphs you can see a variety of information
at different levels.
- Single point control for parallel debugging
- N/A
- Attach/detach to/from running program
- No.
- Breakpoints and data watchpoints
- N/A
- Program state examination
- N/A
- Program state modification
- N/A
- Event tracing mechanism
- Yes, provided by PICL.
- Cache and memory reference tracking/display
- No.
- Remote data access pattern analysis
- No.
- Message tracing/display
- Yes.
- Input/output characterization
- No.
- Real-time monitoring
- No.
- Post-mortem analysis
- Yes.
- Profiling at level of subprocedures and
coarse blocks
- No.
- Utilization display
(communications/idle/IO/computation)
- Yes.
- Performance prediction
- No.
- Comparisons between different runs
- No.
Other
- Commercial/research
- Research
- Cost
- Free
- Webpage
- http://www.netlib.org/paragraph/
- Version Date
- June 1994
- Email
- heath@ncsa.uiuc.edu
Summary
Paragraph does a good job at obtaining ease of use with functionality.
Paragraph does visual animation of message passing on
multi-computer architectures.
I found it to be very easy to use and very helpful. While it does not have
the flexibility of some of the newer performance analyzers, it has all the tools
you need to find the big bottlenecks and problems with your program. The only
setback is that you are limited to the given views. But they provide many
of these views that should be adequate for most purposes. Basically if you
need a quick, easy and portable tool to find the big bottlenecks in your
program, I would highly recommend this tool. However if you need to tune your
program for the best performance possible you might be better off with another
tool.
Ratings (Worse 1 ... 5 Better)
- Performance: x
- Versatility: x
- Ease of Use: x
- Maturity: x
- Capabilities: x
- OVERALL: x
Reviewed by Kevin London, london@cs.utk.edu
August 14, 1996