Intel® - Trace Analyzer and Collector

	Intel® Software Development Products for Intel® Platforms and Technologies

Intel^® Trace Analyzer and Collector 7.2 for Linux* or Windows

Overview		Support		Print
Features		System Requirements

Overview

Analyze, optimize, and deploy high-performance applications on Intel® processor-based clusters. Intel® Trace Analyzer and Collector provide information critical to understanding and optimizing MPI cluster performance by quickly finding performance bottlenecks with MPI communication. Version 7.2 now includes trace file comparison, counter data displays, and an MPI correctness checking library.

Intel® Trace Analyzer and Collector Flash Demo

Features

Why Intel Trace Analyzer and Collector 7.2?

Analyze MPI performance. Speed up parallel application runs. Locate hotspots and bottlenecks. Compare trace files with graphics providing extensively detailed analysis and aligned timelines.

Supported on Linux* and Microsoft* Windows* (Windows Compute Cluster Server* 2003, Windows XP and Windows Server* 2003)

Intuitive full color customizable GUI with many drill down view options

Highly Scalable with low overhead and efficient memory usage

Easy run-time loading — or instrument an MPI application executable

MPI Correctness Checking Library detects many types of errors in communication

Integrated online help

Easy installation and full documentation

Full tracing and/or light-weight statistics gathering

What's New?

Correctness Checking reports now available in the Intel Trace Analyzer GUI

Migration to Trolltech* Qt 4.x for refreshed look-and-feel

Added support for:

-	Intel® Compilers 11.0
-	Microsoft* Windows Vista and HPC Server 2008

Many features, many options, major performance improvements.

	PIN-based binary instrumentation
	Runtime behavior displayed by function, process, thread, timelines or cluster or node
	Multiple types of filtering (functions, processes, messages) and aggregation
	Performance counter data recording can be displayed as timeline
	Trace data is cached to reduce runtime overhead and memory consumption
	Traces multi-threaded MPI applications for event-based tracing to non-MPI applications
	Fail safe tracing
	Support for MPI-1, SHMEM, MPI-IO, ROMIO
	Distributed memory checking with the MPI Correctness checking library

Trace Collector

Automated MPI tracing and MPI Correctness Checking

Generic distributed (non-MPI) and single process tracing

Thread level tracing with traces created even if application crashes

HPM data collection (PAPI, rusage, OS-counters)

Configurable tracefile parameters

Feature disabling/enabling

Tuning parameters

Distributed Memory checking with Valgrind*

Binary runtime instrumentation

Compiler instrumentation

-	Icc/ifort/icpc -tcollect
-	Gcc/g++ -finstrument-functions

API: source code instrumentation (counter, function, message and collective operation logging)

Trace Analyzer

	Event, Quantitative, Qualitative, and Counter Timelines
	Flexible message and collective operation Profiles
	Function Profile (call graph, call tree, flat and load balance)
	Detailed comparison (of 2 traces)
	Multi-level source code visualization with a full text browser
	Flexible and powerful event tagging and filtering
	Hierarchical grouping and aggregation across function or processes data
	Large set of configuration parameters per chart
	Export profiling data as text; export charts to graphics or printer
	Command line interface

MPI Checking

Included in Intel Trace Analyzer and Collector is a unique MPI correctness checker to detect deadlocks, data corruption, or errors with MPI parameters, data types, buffers, communicators, point-to-point messages and collective operations. By providing checks at run-time, and reporting the errors as they are detected, the debugging process is greatly expedited. The correctness checker also allows debugger breakpoints to help in-place analysis but has a small enough footprint to allow use during production runs. The true benefit of the Intel Trace Analyzer and Collector Correctness Checker is the potential to scale to extremely large systems and the ability to detect errors even among a large number of processes. The checker can be set to view deadlocks regardless of fabric type.

By tracking data types and wrapping MPI calls, the requests and communicators can be reused from the trace collector. (The checking library is compiled from the source code of the performance data collection library.) The Analyzer is able to extremely rapidly unwind the call stack and use debug information to map instruction addresses to source code with and without frame pointers.

With both command line and GUI interfaces the user can additionally set up batch runs or do interactive debugging. The timeline view shows actual function calls and process interactions which highlights excessive delays or errors that stem from improper execution ordering.

See screen shots of various displays including metrics tracking, timeline views and parallel displays.

Instrumentation and Tracing

Intel Trace Analyzer and Collector specializes in low intrusion binary instrumentation. It can create and add this instrumentation to existing statically and dynamically linked binary executables to allow automatic monitoring of MPI as well as function entry and exit points. This includes the capability of tracing and recording performance data from parallel threads in C, C++ and Fortran.

Intel Trace Analyzer and Collector support both MPI applications and distributed non-MPI applications in C, C++, and Fortran. For applications running with Intel® MPI Library this includes tracing of internal MPI states.

Support

With the purchase of Intel® Software Development Products, you will receive one year of technical support and product updates from Intel® Premier Support, our interactive issue management and communication Web site. This premium support service allows you to submit questions, download product updates, and access technical notes, application notes, and other documentation. For more information, visit the Intel® Software Development Products Registration Center.

System Requirements

Hardware

Minimum Requirements

IA-32, Intel® 64 or IA-64 (formerly Itanium) architecture-based system. Examples of such Intel processors are:
	Intel® Pentium® 4 processor, or
	Intel® Xeon® processor, or
	Intel® Itanium® processor, or
	Intel® Core™2 Duo processor (example of Intel® 64 architecture)
Note that it is assumed that the processors listed above are configured into homogeneous clusters 4 GB of RAM (8 GB of RAM recommended) 1 GB of hard disk space (10 GB of space recommended)

Operating System Support
All three architectures	Red Hat* Enterprise Linux* 4.0, 5.0 SUSE* Linux Enterprise Server* (SLES) 9, 10
IA-32 and Intel 64 architectures	Microsoft* Windows Vista
Intel® 64 and IA-64 architectures	SGI ProPack* 5
IA-32 architecture only	Microsoft Windows* XP
Intel® 64 architecture only	Red Hat Fefora Core* 7 through 8 cAos* 2 CentOS* 4.6, 5.1 openSuSE* Linux* 10.3 Microsoft* Windows Compute Cluster Server 2003* Microsoft* Windows Server 2003* Microsoft* Windows XP Professional x64 Edition* Microsoft* Windows HPC Server 2008* Microsoft* Windows Server 2008*

Other Supported Software

Intel MPI Library or MPICH

Intel® MPI Benchmarks

Intel® Math Kernel Library

Intel® C++ Compiler

Intel® Fortran Compiler

GNU C, C++, and FORTRAN77 Compilers

SGI Message Passing Toolkit (IA-64 architecture only)

Intel provides both the tools and support to enhance the performance, functionality and efficiency of software applications.

Compatible with leading Windows* and Linux* development environments, Intel® Software Development Products are the fastest and easiest way to take advantage of the latest features of Intel processors. Intel Software Development Products are designed for use in the full development cycle, and include Intel® Performance Libraries, Intel® Compilers (C++, Fortran for Windows, Linux, and Mac OS* X), Intel® VTune™ Analyzer, Intel® Threading Tools and Intel® Cluster Tools.

The Intel® Premier Customer Support Web site provides expert technical support for all Intel software products, product updates and related downloads. For additional product information visit: www.intel.com/software/products.

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