CAMBRIDGE, May 16, 2017 — Ellexus, the I/O profiling company, has unveiled Breeze Healthcheck, a new software tool that gives every engineer the knowledge to improve the performance of their applications.
Breeze Healthcheck produces a simple report that tells the user what an application is doing wrong and why. The tool analyses dozens of different harmful I/O patterns and gives the top ten worst offenders and the impact they are having on the performance of your application and the scalability.
Using Breeze Healthcheck, IT managers can hand over the responsibility for good I/O to the users, who can find the problem and fix it themselves. The tool can also be integrated into a company’s software release structure or workflow qualification to catch bad I/O before it becomes a problem.
As well as looking for bad I/O patterns, Breeze Healthcheck will profile the performance of the IT infrastructure such as file system and network latency. Checks carried out by Breeze Healthcheck include:
- Files or programs used in someone else’s home directory and other hard coded paths that shouldn’t be there
- Lots of small temporary files saved on shared storage or not deleted
- Programs that make very small reads and writes or very large reads and writes
- Programs that stat() or open() lots of files without using them.
The Breeze Healthcheck report contains information about how much time is spent carrying out I/O so you can see how the performance of the file system and network is affecting your application.
Whether you are an IT manager, a software release engineer or a high-performance computing (HPC) user, you need to care about how applications access programs, libraries and files on local and shared file systems. Bad I/O patterns can harm shared storage and will limit application performance, wasting millions in lost engineering time.
Dr Rosemary Francis, CEO of Ellexus, said: “Breeze Healthcheck brings together all our engineers’ expertise in good and bad I/O into one, simple-to-use report. Years of working with a wide variety of HPC customers has given Ellexus a unique, in-depth understanding of what can affect application performance which we are now able to share.
“As organisations target new, more powerful compute architectures and cloud infrastructures, it’s never been more important to optimise the way programs access large datasets – and the responsibility for optimisation shouldn’t just lie in the domain of the experts. It’s all too easy for an application to do something completely stupid, so the focus has got to be on making it easy for all users to understand the mistakes they are making.”
About Ellexus
Ellexus is the I/O profiling company. From a detailed analysis of one application or workflow pipeline to whole-cluster, lightweight monitoring and reporting, we provide solutions that solve all I/O profiling needs.
Our tools provide unique insights into how big data storage clusters are working, enabling IT managers and high-performance computing engineers to multiply productivity and save millions on wasted engineering time. We work across many high-performance and scientific computing sectors, including the semiconductor industry, life sciences, bioinformatics and oil and gas. Customers include ARM, the Sanger Institute and Mentor Graphics.
Unlike any other application profiling software, our unique tools can be run on a live system. We don’t just give you data about what your programs are doing; our tools include expertise on what is going wrong and how you can fix it.
Source: Ellexus