Light-weight Application Monitoring and Tuning with Embedded Gossip

摘要

Advantages of EG include: 1. Global information through local measurements. 2. Low overhead. 3. Low disturbance to applications. 4. Easy to use. Application only needs to re-link with the communication library that has EG built-in. For EG to be more widely applicable, we seek to address following general research challenges: 1. Integrating with other performance tuning tools. EG's ability of obtaining global information through local measurements is interesting, and may be very useful. However, we have not found any existing performance tuning tools that can efficiently use this kind of information. 2. Enabling distributed management. For performance monitoring or tuning tools that require consistent global decision, EG needs to be enhanced with the ability to make globally consistent decision based on weakly consistent information to avoid problems such as deadlocks. 3. Predicting EG's suitability. Using parameters such as communication characteristics of applications, system variances, etc., we need the ability to predict how well EG can serve the monitoring task. EG should be disabled if an application is not suitable to use EG. 4. Providing dependable quantitative information. This reflects the fact that the process of spreading information in EG is under the influence of noises from the application, the run-time system, as well as the underlying hardware.