IPM Hompepage
Overview | Installation | User Guide | Implementation | Publications | Outreach
 

For questions and support, please contact the IPM developers at ipm-hpc-help@lists.sourceforge.net
 

IPM is supported by the National Science Foundation under award number 0721397.

 


Overview

IPM is a portable profiling infrastructure for parallel codes. It provides a low-overhead performance profile of the performance aspects and resource utilization in a parallel program. Communication, computation, and IO are the primary focus. While the design scope targets production computing in HPC centers, IPM has found use in application development, performance debugging and parallel computing education. The level of detail is selectable at runtime and presented through a variety of text and web reports.

IPM has extremely low overhead, is scalable and easy to use requiring no source code modification. It runs on Cray XT.s, IBM SP's, most Linux clusters using MPICH/OPENMPI, SGI Altix and the Earth Simulator. IPM is available under an Open Source software license (LGPL). It is currently installed on several Teragrid, Department of Energy, and other supercomputing resources.

IPM brings together several types of information important to developers and users of parallel HPC codes. The information is gathered in a way the tries to minimize the impact on the running code, maintaining a small fixed memory footprint and using minimal amounts of CPU. When the profile is generated the data from individual tasks is aggregated in a scalable way.

For downloads, news, and other information, visit our Project Page. The monitors that IPM currently integrates are:
  • MPI: communication topology and statistics for each MPI call and buffer size.
  • HPM: PAPI (many) or PMAPI (AIX) performance events.
  • Memory: wallclock, user and system timings.
  • Switch: Communication volume and packet loss.
  • File I/O: Data written and read to disk

Aside from overall performance, reports are available for load balance, task topology, bottleneck detection, and message size distributions. Examples are sometimes better than explanation.

The 'integrated' in IPM is multi-faceted. It refers to binding the above information together through a common interface and also the integration of the records from all the parallel tasks into a single report. At a high level we seek to integrate together the information useful to all stakeholders in HPC into a common interface that allows for common understanding. This includes application developers, science teams using applications, HPC managers, and system architects. IPM is a collaborative project between NERSC/LBL and SDSC. People involved in the project include David Skinner, Nicholas Wright, Karl Fuerlinger and Prof. Kathy Yelick at NERSC/LBNL and Allan Snavely at SDSC.


Last changed: Mon, 05 Oct 2009 22:36:19 +0000 on shell-22005 by fuerling
Website maintained by: The IPM developers. To get help send email to: