ASKALON: a tool set for cluster and Grid computing

Performance engineering of parallel and distributed applications is a complex task that iterates through various phases, ranging from modeling and prediction, to performance measurement, experiment management, data collection, and bottleneck analysis. There is no evidence so far that all of these phases should/can be integrated into a single monolithic tool. Moreover, the emergence of computational Grids as a common single wide-area platform for high-performance computing raises the idea to provide tools as interacting Grid services that share resources, support interoperability among different users and tools, and, most importantly, provide omnipresent services over the Grid. We have developed the ASKALON tool set to support performance-oriented development of parallel and distributed (Grid) applications. ASKALON comprises four tools, coherently integrated into a service-oriented architecture. SCALEA is a performance instrumentation, measurement, and analysis tool of parallel and distributed applications. ZENTURIO is a general purpose experiment management tool with advanced support for multi-experiment performance analysis and parameter studies. AKSUM provides semi-automatic highlevel performance bottleneck detection through a special-purpose performance property specification language. The PerformanceProphet enables the user to model and predict the performance of parallel applications at the early stages of development. In this paper we describe the overall architecture of the ASKALON tool set and outline the basic functionality of the four constituent tools. The structure of each tool is based on the composition and sharing of remote Grid services, thus enabling tool interoperability. In addition, a data repository allows the tools to share the common application performance and output data that have been derived by the individual tools. A service repository is used to store common portable Grid service implementations. A general-purpose Factory service is employed to create service instances on arbitrary remote Grid sites. Discovering and dynamically binding to existing remote services is achieved through registry services. The ASKALON visualization diagrams support both online and postmortem visualization of performance and output data. We demonstrate the usefulness and effectiveness of ASKALON by applying the tools to real-world applications. Copyright (C) 2005 John Wiley Sons, Ltd.