IO profiling of MPI apps

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Article at Linux Mag this week on using strace to develop insight about the IO patterns in your apps

Strace is one of the those all-purpose tools that can be used for debugging problems on your system(s). It can also be used for digging into the IO profile of applications – even if you don’t have the source code (but with Linux you should always have access to the source). In the last article it was shown how strace can be used to gather a great deal of information about the IO behavior of applications.

The reason that strace can be useful is because IO is performed using libraries on Linux (for the vast majority of applications). Because of this strace can record the information of the specific system call (syscall) in a form that is very useful.