Transparent Autonomicity for OpenMP Applications

One of the key needs of an autonomic computing system is the ability to monitor the application performance with minimal intrusiveness and performance overhead. Several solutions have been proposed, differing in terms of effort required by the application programmers to add autonomic capabilities to their applications. In this work we extend the Nornir autonomic framework, allowing it to transparently monitor OpenMP applications thanks to the novel OpenMP Tools (OMPT) API. By using this interface, we are able to transparently transfer performance monitoring information from the application to the Nornir framework. This does not require any manual intervention by the programmer, which can seamlessly control an already existing application, enforcing any performance and/or power consumption requirement. We evaluate our approach on some real applications from the PARSEC and NAS benchmarks, showing that our solution introduces a negligible performance overhead, while being able to correctly control applications’ performance and power consumption.