Unified Trace Environment

Introduction to UTE
UTE is a unified trace environment designed to generate, analyze, and visualize trace events for applications running on IBM Scalable Parallel systems. No source code modification is necessary for trace generation. Message passing events can be generated along with system responses, such as process dispatch, page fault, and I/O activities. User markers are provided to mark various phases, loops, and routines if the application source code is available. All these events can be visualized, not only for users to understand the communication patterns of an application, but also to understand system responses and pinpoint the bottleneck of the application through source code visualization.

UTE is built on top of the IBM AIX trace facility for generating system events. This provides a unified and easily expandable trace environment for various software layers such as MPL, MPI, PIOFS, and HPF. In IBM SP systems with POE 1.2 and AIX 3.2.5, two trace libraries, UTE/MPIF and UTE/MPL, have been developed for MPIF and MPL applications to generate message passing and system events with minimum overhead (a few microseconds per message passing event). Additional hooks have been inserted in other software layers such as PIOFS and Tiger Shark for trace generation, making UTE an easily expandable trace environment for IBM Scalable Parallel systems. In IBM SP systems with POE 2.1 and AIX 4.1, a unified trace library is also being developed for both MPI and MPL applications.

UTE User's Guide and Foils


UTE Papers

  • "A Distributed Connection Manager Interface for Web Services on IBM SP Systems,'' Proc. of the 1996 International Conference on Parallel and Distributed Systems, Tokyo, June 1996. This paper describes a distributed connection manager daemon for Web services and a customized UTE trace library for such a client/server application
  • "A Scalable Web Server and Its Performance Analysis on Multiple Platforms,'' Proc. of ICDCS'96, Hong Kong, May 1996.
  • "UTE: A Unified Trace Environment for IBM SP Systems,'' Proc. of the 8th Conference on Parallel and Distributed Computing Systems, pp. 540 - 547, September 1995. This UTE paper describes the UTE/MPI and UTE/MPL trace libraries along with tools
  • "MPI Programming Environment for IBM SP1/SP2,'' Proc. of ICDCS'95, May 1995. This paper describes the MPI-F programming environment with UTE features
  • "Timestamp Consistency and Trace-Driven Analysis for Distributed Parallel Systems,'' Proc. of IPPS'95, pp. 680 - 686, April 1995. This paper describes the UTE/MPLp trace environment and related issues on timestamp concistency
  • "Parallel I/O Workload Characteristics Using Vesta,'' Proc. of the IPPS'95 Workshop on Input/Output in Parallel and Distributed Systems, pp. 16 - 29, April 1995, also IBM Research Report RC 19940, February 21, 1995.
  • "Trace-Based Analysis and Tuning for Distributed Parallel Applications,'' Proc. of International Conference on Parallel and Distributed Systems, pp. 716 - 723, December 1994. This paper describes the UTE/MPLp trace environment and issues on performance tuning.