[Beowulf] how to detect boundedness

[stephen mulcahy]

Toon Knapen wrote:
> I would like to ask you all what your preferred method is to detect if 
> and how strongly an application is cpu-, memory- or I/O-bound. Do you
> 1) just run the app. on different machines (with diff. characteristics)
> 2) use the profiler
> 3) use hardware monitors such as cache-miss rate, ...
> ....
>  

Hi,

I'm inclined to use a bunch of tools (htop, dstat, vmstat, iostat, free, 
ganglia) to get a picture of whats happening on the system while my app 
is running and then start making some inferences from the behaviour I 
observe.

Having the ability to test your application on hardware with different 
characteristics after coming to some tentative conclusions about the 
charactertistics of your application sounds like a good option but could 
be pretty time consuming.

-stephen

-- 
Stephen Mulcahy, Applepie Solutions Ltd., Innovation in Business Center,
GMIT, Dublin Rd, Galway, Ireland.  +353.91.751262  http://www.aplpi.com
Registered in Ireland, no. 289353 (5 Woodlands Avenue, Renmore, Galway)