Event-action mappings for parallel tools infrastructures

The development of applications for High Performance Computing (HPC) systems is a challenging task. Development steps such as optimization, tuning, porting, and debugging often motivate the use of tools, many of which operate at application runtime. Current trends in the HPC community, such as increasing compute core counts and the advent of new programming paradigms challenge the development of applications, as well as the development of runtime tools. Parallel tools infrastructures can help to simplify the development and adaption of runtime tools by reducing development time and increasing applicability. They can provide reusable tool components, communication services, and abstractions for scalable tools, which preserve lessons learned from existing tools projects. This paper defines an abstraction for a highly integrated infrastructure, which we implement in a prototype that targets MPI applications. Our abstraction enables an incorporation of common tasks such as instrumentation, i.e., observing application behavior, with existing concepts for tool communication, while at the same time enabling scalability. A formal description of our abstraction allows us to highlight its design and to differentiate it from alternatives, so tool developers have a clear understanding of the high-level approach that our infrastructure follows. Existing prototype tools that are based on this infrastructure demonstrate applicability at 1,024 and 16,384 processes respectively.