This paper sets out to examine the future of performance monitoring on exascale HPC systems. In particular we put forth the idea that such machines will be sufficiently complex that performance monitoring of individual applications and the workload as a whole will change from being a beneficial option to being a necessity. This complexity arises from the number of components and concurrencies expected for such systems. We see the need for a shift from performance monitoring being a useful add-on toward it being a core requirement for basic operation and suggest some first steps toward meeting that need.
Kramer, W.T.C., Carter, J., Skinner, D., Oliker, L., Husbands, P., Hargrove, P., Shalf, J., et al. (2006). Software roadmap to plug and play petaflop/s. Technical Report, LBNL-59999, LBNL.
2.
Skinner, D. and Kramer, W.Understanding the causes of performance variability in HPC workloads, IEEE International Symposium on Workload Characterization, IISWC05.
