Supercomputing ''90 BOF Session on Standardizing Parallel Trace Formats

As part of last year''s Supercomputing ''90, there was a Birds of Feather session on standardizing the trace files that come out of parallel program execution. This report contains the minutes of that meeting. Cherri Pancake, Auburn University, introduced the meeting and the participants. Objectives of the meeting were to determine what we want to do about standardizing trace formats, particularly for parallel processing. Standardization would allow system-independent tools to be developed; it also would allow the sharing of traces and perhaps even performance comparisons for applications on different machines and systems. Discussion in this BOF was limited to application performance and did not include system performance.