ARCHIVED: On AVIDD at IU, what profiling tools are available, and how do I use them?

Note: UITS began retiring the AVIDD system on May 1 as originally scheduled, but portions of the system will remain online until mid-August. UITS retired AVIDD-T, AVIDD-N, and AVIDD-I on May 1, but is delaying the retirement of AVIDD-B and AVIDD-O pending the installation of a replacement system based on Intel's X86-64 technology. If you use AVIDD-B or AVIDD-O, UITS encourages you to migrate to Big Red and/or the TeraGrid; for help, email High Performance Computing. If you cannot migrate, AVIDD-B and AVIDD-O will remain available to you until the new system is ready for use in mid-August.

Profiling tools on the AVIDD cluster at Indiana University include gprof, Intel Trace Analyzer/Collector (for MPI only), and XMPI (also for LAM MPI). For more information about gprof, refer to its man pages.

The general procedure for using prof and gprof is to compile using the -g or -pg option, run the executable to generate the profile file (by default, this is either mon.out or gmon.out), and then use the prof or gprof command to read the symbol table in the executable and correlate with the profile file.

Note: With prof and gprof, you can profile only serial programs.

For information about XMPI and Intel Trace Collector/Analyzer, see "Tools for Programmers" on the High Performance Computing web site:

For more information about profiling tools, see the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory's tutorial on Performance Analysis Tools at:

This document was developed with support from the National Science Foundation (NSF) under Grant No. 0503697 to the University of Chicago and subcontracted to Indiana University. Additional support was provided by IU through its participation in the TeraGrid, which is supported by the NSF under Grants No. 0833618, SCI451237, SCI535258, and SCI504075. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the NSF.