[Users] Graphical display of timer data

[Steven R. Brandt]

Thanks, Ian. Yes, we were thinking of the detailed timers and we were 
thinking about making a modification to provide live data. We'll make 
the project soon.

--Steve


On 05/23/2017 02:17 AM, Ian Hinder wrote:
>
> On 22 May 2017, at 21:35, Steven R. Brandt <sbrandt at cct.lsu.edu 
> <mailto: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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