PerfView: A Performance Monitoring and Visualization Tool for Intel Itanium Architecture

Abstract

Application performance analysis in modern microprocessors has become extremely complex due to substantial instruction level parallelism, complex processor pipelines and deep memory hierarchies. Performance analysts need to have a thorough understanding of the dynamic behavior of programs in order to identify and fix performance bottlenecks. In order to help in the performance analysis process, modern day processors provide hardware support in the form of performance registers that capture micro-architectural events at program runtime. However, the data provided by these hardware registers is at a very low level and an extensive effort has to be made by performance analysts to make sense of the data. Therefore, it is extremely beneficial to make use of performance analysis tools that can assemble various types of performance related information available from the performance registers to provide a high level summary of the data. In this paper, we discuss PerfView, which is (1) a source-code based visualization tool (2) a tool that identifies and allows users to view performance-critical events based on execution paths and (3) an interactive performance monitoring and debugging tool.