Newsgroups: comp.parallel.pvm
From: maillet@imag.fr (Eric Maillet )
Subject: Re: Statistics about PVM communication paterns
Organization: Institut Imag, Grenoble, France
Date: 18 Jul 1995 16:15:28 GMT
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Message-ID: <3ugmn0$jc5@cosmos.imag.fr>

In article <3uejic$p93@overload.lbl.gov>, Marat Boshernitsan <maratb> writes:
> Hello,
> 
> I am interested in collecting statistics of PVM usage, in particular I am
> looking for information on PVM communication patterns, such as number of
> messages and typical message sizes used by various applications.  I am not sure
> if such information has been collected before and I am prepared to do some work
> myself. 

The simulator of the Paragraph visualization tool computes all of the statistics
you mentioned above (Menu OTHER/STATISTICS), including busy and idle times of
processors, count and volume (in bytes) of messages sent and received, averages, maxima
and minima of message size, transit time etc... It comes with a number of sample
traces taken on different parallel applications developed with the PICL library. Although
the underlying library is PICL, not PVM, the resulting statistics may be useful to you.

Different PVM based intrumentation tools are available which collect
performance traces on PVM applications for use with Paragraph (we developed such a tool,
called Tape/Pvm which is publically available by anonymous ftp at ftp.imag.fr in 
/imag/APACHE/TAPE). We also have a number of performance traces (including PICL) taken on
different PVM applications (fft,fft2d,weather forecasting...). If you are interested in
some of these traces I can send them to you.

> So, I would greatly appreciate if people could point me to some application
> packages (however specialized) written using PVM library that are available in
> public domain.  Of particular interest are various simulators, etc. that come
> with sample data and require little interactive input.
> 

Pragraph is strongly interactive, though. Its statistical engine cannot be used
from the command line :-(

The statistics you are interested in can be easily computed from a performance trace
(a little "awk" script should do most of the work). With Tape/Pvm for example
you can also use the provided trace reader library which allows you to easily browse a 
performance trace, detect send, receive, group events, and access the events' attributes
(e.g. message size, source and destination processor). A few lines of C will do !

Hope this helps.

Regards,

Eric
 

