lo2s is a lightweight node-level performance monitoring tool used to analyze applications, the operating system and hardware.

Lightweight Node-Level Performance Monitoring

lo2s creates parallel OTF2 traces with a focus on both application and system view. The traces can contain any of the following information:

• From running threads
  • Calling context samples based on instruction overflows
  • The calling context samples are annotated with the disassembled assembler instruction string
  • The framepointer-based call-path for each calling context sample
  • Per-thread performance counter readings
  • Which thread was scheduled on which CPU at what time
• From the system
  • Metrics from tracepoints (e.g. the selected C-state or P-state)
  • The node-level system tree (cpus (HW-threads), cores, packages)
  • CPU power measurements (x86_energy)
  • Microarchitecture specific metrics (x86_adapt, per package or per core)
  • Arbitrary metrics through plugins (Score-P compatible)
  • Syscall activity

In general lo2s operates either in process monitoring or system monitoring mode.

With process monitoring, all information is grouped by each thread of a monitored process group - it shows you on which CPU is each monitored thread running. lo2s either acts as a prefix command to run the process (and also tracks its children), or lo2s attaches to a running process.

In the system monitoring mode, information is grouped by logical CPU - it shows you which thread was running on a given CPU. Metrics are also shown per CPU.

In both modes, system-level metrics (e.g. tracepoints), are always grouped by their respective system hardware component.

Build Requirements

• Linux (>= 4.3)¹
• OTF2 (>= 3.0)
• libbfd
• libiberty
• CMake (>= 3.11)
• A C++ Compiler with C++17 support and the std::filesystem library (GCC > 7, Clang > 5)

¹: Older kernels can work as the required features are oftentimes backported. Otherwise lo2s 1.7.0 can be used, which is the newest lo2s version with support for kernels as old as even 2.6.32.

Optional Build Dependencies

• x86_adapt for mircorarchitecture specific metrics
• x86_energy for CPU power metrics
• libradare (>= 5.8.0) for disassembled instruction strings
• libsensors for sensor readings
• libaudit to resolve syscall names, otherwise only syscall nrs can be used in syscall tracing
• pod2man to generate the man pages (typically distributed as part of perl)
• gzip to compress the man pages

Runtime Requirements

• kernel.perf_event_paranoid should be less than or equal to 1 for process monitoring mode and less than or equal to 0 in system monitoring mode. A value of -1 will give the most features for non-root performance recording, such as tracepoints and block I/O, at the cost of some security. Modify as follows:

  sudo sysctl kernel.perf_event_paranoid=1

• Tracepoints, block I/O and syscalls require access to debugfs. Grant permissions at your own discretion.

  sudo mount -t debugfs none /sys/kernel/debug

Installation

• It is recommended to create an empty build directory anywhere.
• cmake /path/to/lo2s
• Configure cmake as usual, e.g. with ccmake .
• make
• make install

Usage

To monitor a given application in process monitoring execute

• lo2s -- ./a.out --app-args

To monitor all activity on a system run

• lo2s -a (stop the recording with ctrl+c)

For a full documentation of options see the manpage.

Usage with MPI

You can record simple traces from MPI programs, but lo2s does not record MPI communication. To create fully-featured MPI-aware traces, use Score-P.

• lo2s mpirun ./a.out Create one trace of mpirun, useful if mpirun is used locally on one node.
• mpirun lo2s ./a.out Creates a separate trace for each process.

See man lo2s or lo2s --help for a full listing of options and usage.

Quirks

The perf_event_open kernel infrastructure changed significantly over time. Therefore, it is already hard to just keep track which kernel version introduced which new feature. Combine that with the abundance of backports of particular features by different distributors, and you end with a mess of options.

In the effort to keep compatible with older kernels and some architectures that lack hardware breakpoint support, several quirks have been added to lo2s:

1. The initial time synchronization between lo2s and the kernel-space perf is done with a hardware breakpoint. If your kernel or processor architecture doesn't support that, you can use a fallback using the CMake option USE_HW_BREAKPOINT_COMPAT.
2. If you get the following error message: event 'ref-cycles' is not available as a metric leader!, you can fallback to the bus-cycles metric as leader using the lo2s command-lind argument --metric-leader bus-cycles.

Working with traces

Traces can be visualized with Vampir. You can use OTF2 or any of its tools. Native interfaces are available for C and Python

Acknowledgements

This work is supported in part by the German Research Foundation (DFG) within the CRC 912 - HAEC and the german National High Performance Computing (NHR@TUD).

Primary Reference

A description and use cases can be found in the following paper. Please cite this if you use lo2s for scientific work.

Thomas Ilsche, Robert Schöne, Mario Bielert, Andreas Gocht and Daniel Hackenberg. lo2s – Multi-Core System and Application Performance Analysis for Linux 📕 In: Workshop on Monitoring and Analysis for High Performance Computing Systems Plus Applications (HPCMASPA). 2017. DOI: 10.1109/CLUSTER.2017.116

Additional References

Thomas Ilsche, Marcus Hähnel, Robert Schöne, Mario Bielert and Daniel Hackenberg: Powernightmares: The Challenge of Efficiently Using Sleep States on Multi-Core Systems 📕 In: 5th Workshop on Runtime and Operating Systems for the Many-core Era (ROME). 2017, DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-75178-8_50

Thomas Ilsche, Robert Schöne, Philipp Joram, Mario Bielert and Andreas Gocht: System Monitoring with lo2s: Power and Runtime Impact of C-State Transitions 📕 In: 2018 IEEE International Parallel and Distributed Processing Symposium Workshops (IPDPSW), DOI: 10.1109/IPDPSW.2018.00114

Thomas Ilsche, Mario Bielert, Christian von Elm: Bridging the Gap between Application Performance Analysis and System Monitoring 📕 In: 2022 IEEE International Conference on Cluster Computing (CLUSTER), DOI: 10.1109/CLUSTER51413.2022.00080

Name

The name lo2s is an acronym for Linux OTF2 Sampling