IBM Power Systems 775 Manual page 106

Performance Tools environment
This section describes the performance tools.
HPC toolkit
The IBM HPC Toolkit is a collection of tools that you use to analyze the performance of
parallel and serial applications that are written in C or FORTRAN and running the AIX or
Linux operating systems on IBM Power Systems Servers. The Xprof GUI also supports C++
applications. These tools perform the following functions:
Provide access to hardware performance counters for performing low-level analysis of an
application, including analyzing cache usage and floating-point performance.
Profile and trace an MPI application for analyzing MPI communication patterns and
performance problems.
Profile an OpenMP application for analyzing OpenMP performance problems and to help
you determine whether an OpenMP application properly structures its processing for best
performance.
Profile the application I/O for analyzing the I/O patterns of an application and determine
whether you can improve the I/O performance of the application.
Profile the execution of an application for identifying hot spots in the application, and for
locating relationships between functions in your application to help you better understand
the performance of the application.
HPCS Toolkit
Figure 1-68 on page 93 shows the following toolkit high-level design flow:
Based on existing IBM HPC Toolkit for application tuning
HPCS Toolkit is a set of productivity enhancement technologies:
– Performance Data Collection (extensible):
• Scalable, dynamic, programmable
• Binary: no source code modification to instrument application
• Retains ability to correlate all performance data with source code
– Bottleneck Discovery (extensible):
• Make sense of the performance data
• Mines the performance data to extract bottlenecks
– Solution Determination (extensible):
• Make sense of the bottlenecks
• Mines bottlenecks and suggests system solutions (hardware or software)
• Assist compiler optimization (including custom code transformations)
– Performance Visualization (extensible):
• Performance Data/Bottleneck/Solution Information feedback to User
• Logging (textual information)
• Compiler feedback
• Output to other tools (for example, Kojak analysis, Paraver visualization, and Tau)
HPCS Toolkit provides Automated Framework for Performance Analysis:
– Intelligent automation of performance evaluation and decision system
– Interactive capability with graphical/visual interface always available, but always
optional
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IBM Power Systems 775 for AIX and Linux HPC Solution