Abstract
The backtrace is one of the most common operations done by profiling and debugging tools. It consists in determining the nesting of functions leading to the current execution state. Frameworks and standard libraries provide facilities enabling this operation, however, it generally incurs both computational and memory costs. Indeed, walking the stack up and then possibly resolving functions pointers (to function names) before storing them can lead to non-negligible costs. In this paper, we propose to explore a means of extracting optimized backtraces with an O(1) storage size by defining the notion of stack tags. We define a new data-structure that we called a hashed-trie used to encode stack traces at runtime through chained hashing. Our process called stack-tagging is implemented in a GCC plugin, enabling its use of C and C++ application. A library enabling the decoding of stack locators though both static and brute-force analysis is also presented. This work introduces a new manner of capturing execution state which greatly simplifies both extraction and storage which are important issues in parallel profiling.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
References
The gnu libc. https://www.gnu.org/software/libc/
Linux standard base core specification 5.0 (2015). http://refspecs.linuxfoundation.org/lsb.shtml
ARM: Exception handling abi for the arm®architecture. http://infocenter.arm.com/
Baker, A.H., Falgout, R.D., Kolev, T.V., Yang, U.M.: Multigrid smoothers for ultraparallel computing. SIAM J. Sci. Comput. 33(5), 2864–2887 (2011)
Becker, D.: Timestamp Synchronization of Concurrent Events. Dr. (fh), T. Aachen, Jülich (2010). http://juser.fz-juelich.de/record/10841. Record converted from VDB: 12.11.2012; Aachen, TH, Diss., 2010
Becker, D., Rabenseifner, R., Wolf, F., Linford, J.C.: Scalable timestamp synchronization for event traces of message-passing applications. Parallel Comput. 35(12), 595–607 (2009)
Besnard, J.B., Malony, A.D., Shende, S., Pérache, M., Jaeger, J.: Gleaming the cube: Online performance analysis and visualization using malp. In: Knüpfer, A., Hilbrich, T., Niethammer, C., Gracia, J., Nagel, W.E., Resch, M.M. (eds.) Tools for High Performance Computing 2015, pp. 53–66. Springer International Publishing, Cham (2016)
Bond, M.D., McKinley, K.S.: Probabilistic calling context. In: Acm Sigplan Notices, vol. 42, pp. 97–112. ACM (2007)
Committee, D.D.I.F. et al.: Dwarf debugging information format, version 5. Free Standards Group (2017)
Eschweiler, D., Wagner, M., Geimer, M., Knüpfer, A., Nagel, W.E., Wolf, F.: Open trace format 2: The next generation of scalable trace formats and support libraries. PARCO 22, 481–490 (2011)
Gamblin, T., LeGendre, M., Collette, M.R., Lee, G.L., Moody, A., de Supinski, B.R., Futral, S.: The spack package manager: bringing order to hpc software chaos. In: Proceedings of the International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage and Analysis, p. 40. ACM (2015)
Geimer, M., Kuhlmann, B., Pulatova, F., Wolf, F., Wylie, B.J.N.: Scalable collation and presentation of call-path profile data with CUBE. In: Parallel Computing: Architectures, Algorithms and Applications, ParCo 2007, Forschungszentrum Jülich and RWTH Aachen University, Germany. Accessed 4–7 Sept 2007, pp. 645–652 (2007)
Geimer, M., Wolf, F., Wylie, B.J., Ábrahám, E., Becker, D., Mohr, B.: The scalasca performance toolset architecture. Concurr. Comput.: Pract. Exp. 22(6), 702–719 (2010)
Heroux, M.: Minife documentation
Intel: Intel®mpi benchmarks user guide. URL https://software.intel.com/en-us/imb-user-guide
Karlin, I., Keasler, J., Neely, R.: Lulesh 2.0 updates and changes. Technical Report LLNL-TR-641973 (2013)
Knüpfer, A., Brunst, H., Nagel, W.E.: High performance event trace visualization. In: 13th Euromicro Workshop on Parallel, Distributed and Network-Based Processing (PDP 2005). Accessed 6–11 Feb 2005, Lugano, Switzerland, pp. 258–263 (2005). https://doi.org/10.1109/EMPDP.2005.24
Knuth, D.E.: The art of computer programming: sorting and searching, vol. 3. Pearson Education (1997)
Merkle, R.C.: A digital signature based on a conventional encryption function. In: Conference on the Theory and Application of Cryptographic Techniques, pp. 369–378. Springer (1987)
Mey, D.a., Biersdorf, S., Bischof, C., Diethelm, K., Eschweiler, D., Gerndt, M., Knüpfer, A., Lorenz, D., Malony, A., Nagel, W.E., Oleynik, Y., Rössel, C., Saviankou, P., Schmidl, D., Shende, S., Wagner, M., Wesarg, B., Wolf, F.: Score-p: A unified performance measurement system for petascale applications. In: Bischof, C., Hegering, H.G., Nagel, W.E., Wittum, G. (eds.) Competence in High Performance Computing, pp. 85–97 (2010). Springer, Berlin (2012)
Mosberger, D., Watson, D., et al.: libunwind documentation (2011). https://www.nongnu.org/libunwind/docs.html
Mosberger, D., Watson, D. et al.: The libunwind project (2011). https://www.nongnu.org/libunwind/
Shende, S.S., Malony, A.D.: The tau parallel performance system. Int. J. High Perform. Comput. Appl. 20(2), 287–311 (2006)
Stallman, R., Pesch, R., Shebs, S., et al.: Debugging with gdb. Free Softw. Found. 51, 02110–1301 (2002)
Szebenyi, Z., Gamblin, T., Schulz, M., d. Supinski, B.R., Wolf, F., Wylie, B.J.N.: Reconciling sampling and direct instrumentation for unintrusive call-path profiling of mpi programs. In: 2011 IEEE International Parallel Distributed Processing Symposium, pp. 640–651 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1109/IPDPS.2011.67
Taylor, I.L.: libbacktrace. https://github.com/ianlancetaylor/libbacktrace
Treibig, J., Hager, G., Wellein, G.: Likwid: A lightweight performance-oriented tool suite for x86 multicore environments. In: 2010 39th International Conference on Parallel Processing Workshops, pp. 207–216. IEEE (2010)
Vetter, J., Chambreau, C.: mpip: Lightweight, scalable mpi profiling (2005)
Wagner, M., Knüpfer, A., Nagel, W.E.: Hierarchical memory buffering techniques for an in-memory event tracing extension to the open trace format 2. In: 2013 42nd International Conference on Parallel Processing, pp. 970–976 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1109/ICPP.2013.115
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2021 Springer Nature Switzerland AG
About this paper
Cite this paper
Besnard, JB. et al. (2021). Exploring Space-Time Trade-Off in Backtraces. In: Mix, H., Niethammer, C., Zhou, H., Nagel, W.E., Resch, M.M. (eds) Tools for High Performance Computing 2018 / 2019. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-66057-4_8
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-66057-4_8
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-66056-7
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-66057-4
eBook Packages: Mathematics and StatisticsMathematics and Statistics (R0)