Grindstone: A Test Suite for Parallel Performance Tools

We describe Grindstone, a suite of programs for testing and calibrating parallel performance measurement tools. The suite consists of nine simple SPMD style PVM programs that demonstrate common communication and computational bottlenecks that occur in parallel programs. In addition, we provide a short case study that demonstrates the use of the test suite on three performance tools for PVM. The results of the case study showed that we were able to uncover bugs or other anomalies in all three tools. The paper also describes how to acquire, compile, and use the test suite. U This work was supported in part by NIST CRA award 70-NANB-5H0055, DOE Grant DE-FG02-93ER25176, and the State of Maryland. 1. Introduction Creating and debugging performance measurement tools for parallel systems is a difficult task. First, parallel tools are often parallel programs in their own right, and as such have all of the difficulties of writing parallel programs. Second, the input data for parallel tools ...