What is Performance Analysis Tools

This chapter presents a study of leading open source performance analysis tools for high performance computing (HPC). The first section motivates the necessity of open source tools for performance analysis. Background information on performance analysis of computational software is presented discussing the various performance critical components of computers. Metrics useful for performance analysis of common performance bottleneck patterns observed in computational codes are enumerated and followed by an evaluation of open source tools useful for extracting these metrics. The tool’s features are analyzed from the perspective of an end user. Important factors are discussed, such as the portability of tuning applied after identification of performance bottlenecks, the hardware/software requirements of the tools, the need for additional metrics for novel hardware features, and identification of these new metrics and techniques for measuring them. This chapter focuses on open source tools since they are freely available to anyone at no cost.