White-box benchmarking

Structural performance analysis of the NAS parallel benchmarks is used to time code sections and specific classes of activity, such as communication or data movements. This technique is called white-box benchmarking because, similarly to white-box methodologies used in program testing, the programs are not treated as black boxes. The timing methodology is portable, which is indispensable to make comparative benchmarking across different computer systems. A combination of conditional compilation and code instrumentation is used to measure execution time related to different aspects of application performance. This benchmarking methodology is proposed to help understand,parallel application behaviour on distributed-memory parallel platforms.