Tools for the MPICH implementation of MPI

Debugging

Etnus, Inc. offers a version of the Totalview debugger that supports MPICH (as well as some other MPI implementations).

The Portland Group offers a variety of tools, including

PGDBG
PGPROF
CDK CDK includes MPICH (compiled with PGI compilers).

More detailed documentation of these parallel tools is available in our PGI Tools Guide.

Profiling

The MPICH implementation includes two profiling tools, upshot and nupshot, as well as a tool for exploiting the MPI profiling interface. These are documented in the installation and users guides for MPICH.

Performance Analysis

Intel offers the trace collector and analyzer MPI performance analysis tool. It comes with profiling libraries for various MPI implementations (including MPICH) on many parallel platforms.

Paradyn is a performance measurement tool for parallel and distributed programs. Paradyn uses several novel technologies so that it scales to long running programs and large systems, and automates much of the search for performance bottlenecks. Paradyn can measure MPI applications using the native MPI implementation on parallel computers and using MPICH (currently supporting the ch_p4 driver) on workstation clusters.

Datatypes

MPI Datatypes are powerful objects that can represent arbitrarily complex patterns in memory. The tool MPIMap from John May is available; see the MPIMap web page for more information. This tool exploits MPI-2 features for accessing information about MPI datatypes and hence works with any conforming MPI implementation.