Make Carpet timers hierarchical

With the current flat structure of timers in Carpet, it is difficult to identify which timers are contained in which other timers, and hence to avoid double-counting when adding up the times.

This series of patches modifies the timer infrastructure in Carpet to generate a tree of timers where the hierarchy reflects the call-graph of the program. This makes it much easier to interpret the timer output than with the previous flat structure, where it was not possible to see which timers "contained" which others. More implementation details are given at the top of TimerNode.hh.

Note that the Timer source and header files have been renamed as CactusTimer and a new Timer file and object has been created. This is because the Timer object now only provides a wrapper around the Cactus timer mechanism which was contained in the old Timer object.

New parameters output_initialise_timer_tree and output_timer_tree_every control output of a new "timer tree diagram" to standard output for the Initialise and Evolve timer trees respectively. These diagrams indicate:

the value of each timer;
the percentage of the given tree taken by each timer;
which timers are contained in which other timers;
any untimed code

for any timer which takes more than 1% of the tree time.

Making the timers hierarchical means that the ad-hoc methods used before to identify the hierarchy (such as naming the timer Evolve::Sync, for example, to indicate that the Sync timer was a child of the Evolve timer) are no longer necessary and have been removed. Additionally, the construction of timers in a "dynamic" manner is now handled automatically for all timers, so special-case code is no longer needed and has been removed.

Additionally some previously-untimed parts of the code are now timed, and timer names have been made more consistent in some places.

There is code in the patches to output the entire timer tree as an XML file, but it is not enabled.

Ideally the timer tree printed to standard output would contain reductions across processes, but at the moment it contains only the timer from the current process.

The attached "tree-example.txt" file shows an example of the timer tree that is printed for a simulation using the qc0-mclachlan parameter file from the Einstein Toolkit.

Keyword:

Comments (13)