[MPICH] Profiling an application's network usage through MPI calls

[Anthony Chan]

On Sun, 4 Sep 2005, Diego M. Vadell wrote:

> Hi,
>    First of all, sorry if this is has a known answer, is a stupid question, or
> if Im out of place somehow. As I'm new to mpi and MPICH, I know I may have
> wrong concepts.
>    I co-administer a couple of clusters in the university of Buenos Aires. I
> would like to know how does the MPI applications use the network: for
> example, lots of short messages, some big messages, lots of big messages,
> etc.
>     My first thought was to use tcpdump and then process it's output. Then I
> thought that if there were a log file where mpich left a timestamp and the
> size of the MPI message each time it sends one, I would have more accurate
> information.
>
>   My questions: is there any way to make MPICH leave such a log? also, is
> there a better way to profile an application's network usage?

MPICH/MPICH2 comes with MPE/MPE2 which can be used to profile an MPI
application.  Check http://www.mcs.anl.gov/perfvis for more info.

There are other tools to profile MPI like TAU or Vampir.  You can find
more info about them by googling about the name of the tools.

A.Chan