Parallel program design and development is inherently more difficult than its sequential counterpart. People who have traditionally programmed on sequential machines are now called upon to deal with new and complex tissues when trying to control a number of entities executing concurrently. In the quest to produce application programs that take advantage of the power of the underlying hardware, usable and efficient tools are required to assist with the task of performance analysis and tuning. A large number of tools are described in the literature, but the results of tool use are disappointing. The problem can be attributed to the fact that tool design is not informed about users and their tasks. This thesis presents an investigation of tuners' practices and analyses its implications for tool support. An initial investigation by means of interviews and questionnaires provided the basis of a framework for the analysis of tuning. A number of problems with existing tuning tools were recorded and tuner requirements were captured. Some of these requirements were investigated further with a smaller number of local tuners who participated in the design of VISPAT, a tool for visualising the performance of parallel programmes running on clusters of workstations. Tuning was also examined in the wider context of requirements and work practices within multi-people development projects. An environment is proposed - the Tuner's Workbench - which addresses issues which arise from the repetitive nature of tuning, namely, its management and documentation in the context of real world parallel code development.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:bl.uk/oai:ethos.bl.uk:652540 |
| Date | January 1997 |
| Creators | Hondroudakis, Anna |
| Publisher | University of Edinburgh |
| Source Sets | Ethos UK |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
| Source | http://hdl.handle.net/1842/15043 |
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