[Users] Graphical display of timer data

[Ian Hinder]

On 22 May 2017, at 21:35, Steven R. Brandt <sbrandt at cct.lsu.edu> wrote:

> Is there a way to graphically display cactus timer data? We're thinking 
> about having an REU student develop such a tool if it doesn't exist. Thanks.

Hi Steve,

Not that I know of.  What sort of graphical display are you thinking of?  Anyone can plot the Carpet timing variables (physical_time_per_hour as a function of time) etc in whatever they usually use to make plots of Cactus data.

If you are thinking of the detailed timers used to profile the different parts of the code, then it would be good to have something to make a quick plot of these.  They could take the timertree.*.xml files and produce a hierarchical display of the timers.  This could be a tree or a pie chart.  I have done this before using Mathematica.  Some of the things I did were:

	– Selecting a threshold so that timers which contribute a small amount are omitted, otherwise there are too many timers to display
	– Creating "groups" (via string patterns) so that you can logically group things together (e.g. you might want to merge all the different McLachlan RHS timers into a single one) depending on the analysis you are doing

It would be good to have a tool, maybe based on Python and Matplotlib, to generate such plots quickly and simply.  One issue is that the timer XML files are only written at the end of the simulation, and their content is not reduced among processors.  It is usually quite important to consider all the processors, not just the first one, so we should think about how this should be done.  Depending on what you want to achieve, it could also be useful to output the XML files regularly, though then you have to think about whether it's important to keep the historical data, or just replace with the current totals.  It also leads to a large number of output files since we have one per process.  This is why I don't enable this timer output in my own simulations, except when explicitly benchmarking/profiling.  

Perhaps you could create a page under "projects" on the ET wiki and we can make notes and suggestions there?

-- 
Ian Hinder
http://members.aei.mpg.de/ianhin

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