Performance Analyzer

Last updated
Performance Analyzer
PerformanceAnalyzer.png
Developer(s) Oracle
Stable release
12.5 / June 2016;2 years ago (2016-06) [1]
Operating system Solaris and Linux
Type Profiler
License Commercial proprietary software
Website oracle.com/technetwork/server-storage/solarisstudio/features/performance-analyzer-2292312.html

Performance Analyzer is a commercial utility software for software performance analysis for x86 or SPARC machines. It has both a graphical user interface [2] and a command line interface. It is available for both Linux and Solaris operating systems. It can profile C, C++ and Java. [3]

Utility software is system software designed to help to analyze, configure, optimize or maintain a computer. It is used to support the computer infrastructure - in contrast to application software, which is aimed at directly performing tasks that benefit ordinary users. Utilities often form part of application systems however. For example a batch job may run user-written code to update a database and may then include a step that runs a utility to back up the database, or a job may run a utility to compress a disk before copying files.

x86 family of instruction set architectures

x86 is a family of instruction set architectures based on the Intel 8086 microprocessor and its 8088 variant. The 8086 was introduced in 1978 as a fully 16-bit extension of Intel's 8-bit 8080 microprocessor, with memory segmentation as a solution for addressing more memory than can be covered by a plain 16-bit address. The term "x86" came into being because the names of several successors to Intel's 8086 processor end in "86", including the 80186, 80286, 80386 and 80486 processors.

SPARC RISC instruction set architecture

SPARC is a reduced instruction set computing (RISC) instruction set architecture (ISA) originally developed by Sun Microsystems. Its design was strongly influenced by the experimental Berkeley RISC system developed in the early 1980s. First released in 1987, SPARC was one of the most successful early commercial RISC systems, and its success led to the introduction of similar RISC designs from a number of vendors through the 1980s and 90s.

Performance Analyzer is available as part of Oracle Developer Studio. It has visualization capabilities, can read out hardware performance counters, [4] thread synchronization, memory allocations and I/O, and specifically supports Java, OpenMP, MPI, and the Solaris kernel.

Oracle Developer Studio, formerly named Oracle Solaris Studio, Sun Studio, Sun WorkShop, Forte Developer, and SunPro Compilers, is Oracle Corporation's flagship software development product for the Solaris and Linux operating systems. It includes optimizing C, C++, and Fortran compilers, libraries, and performance analysis and debugging tools, for Solaris on SPARC and x86 platforms, and Linux on x86/x64 platforms, including multi-core systems.

In computers, hardware performance counters, or hardware counters are a set of special-purpose registers built into modern microprocessors to store the counts of hardware-related activities within computer systems. Advanced users often rely on those counters to conduct low-level performance analysis or tuning.

OpenMP open standard for parallelizing

OpenMP is an application programming interface (API) that supports multi-platform shared memory multiprocessing programming in C, C++, and Fortran, on most platforms, instruction set architectures and operating systems, including Solaris, AIX, HP-UX, Linux, macOS, and Windows. It consists of a set of compiler directives, library routines, and environment variables that influence run-time behavior.

See also

In software engineering, profiling is a form of dynamic program analysis that measures, for example, the space (memory) or time complexity of a program, the usage of particular instructions, or the frequency and duration of function calls. Most commonly, profiling information serves to aid program optimization.

VTune Amplifier performance profiler is a commercial application for software performance analysis of 32 and 64-bit x86 based machines. It has both a graphical user interface (GUI) and command line and comes in versions for Linux or Microsoft Windows operating systems. An optional download lets you analyze the Windows or Linux data with a GUI on macOS. Many features work on both Intel and AMD hardware, but advanced hardware-based sampling requires an Intel-manufactured CPU.

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Sun Microsystems defunct computer hardware and software company which was based in Santa Clara

Sun Microsystems, Inc. was an American company that sold computers, computer components, software, and information technology services and created the Java programming language, the Solaris operating system, ZFS, the Network File System (NFS), and SPARC. Sun contributed significantly to the evolution of several key computing technologies, among them Unix, RISC processors, thin client computing, and virtualized computing. Sun was founded on February 24, 1982. At its height, the Sun headquarters were in Santa Clara, California, on the former west campus of the Agnews Developmental Center.

Debugger A computer program

A debugger or debugging tool is a computer program that is used to test and debug other programs. The code to be examined might alternatively be running on an instruction set simulator (ISS), a technique that allows great power in its ability to halt when specific conditions are encountered, but which will typically be somewhat slower than executing the code directly on the appropriate processor. Some debuggers offer two modes of operation, full or partial simulation, to limit this impact.

A computing platform or digital platform is the environment in which a piece of software is executed. It may be the hardware or the operating system (OS), even a web browser and associated application programming interfaces, or other underlying software, as long as the program code is executed with it. Computing platforms have different abstraction levels, including a computer architecture, an OS, or runtime libraries. A computing platform is the stage on which computer programs can run.

OpenSolaris Open source operating system from Sun Microsystems based on Solaris

OpenSolaris is a discontinued, open source computer operating system based on Solaris created by Sun Microsystems. It was also the name of the project initiated by Sun to build a developer and user community around the software. After the acquisition of Sun Microsystems in 2010, Oracle decided to discontinue open development of the core software, and replaced the OpenSolaris distribution model with the proprietary Solaris Express.

The Apple Developer Tools are a suite of software tools from Apple to aid in making software dynamic titles for the macOS and iOS platforms. The developer tools were formerly included on macOS install media, but are now exclusively distributed over the Internet. As of macOS 10.12, Xcode is available as a free download from the Mac App Store.

EiffelStudio

EiffelStudio is a development environment for the Eiffel programming language developed and distributed by Eiffel Software.

Intel Fortran Compiler, also known as IFORT, is a group of Fortran compilers from Intel for Windows, OS X, and Linux.

Intel Parallel Studio XE is a software development product developed by Intel that facilitates native code development on Windows, macOS and Linux in C++ and Fortran for parallel computing. Parallel programming enables software programs to take advantage of multi-core processors from Intel and other processor vendors.

libvirt virtualization middleware

libvirt is an open-source API, daemon and management tool for managing platform virtualization. It can be used to manage KVM, Xen, VMware ESXi, QEMU and other virtualization technologies. These APIs are widely used in the orchestration layer of hypervisors in the development of a cloud-based solution.

The Java Development Kit (JDK) is an implementation of either one of the Java Platform, Standard Edition, Java Platform, Enterprise Edition, or Java Platform, Micro Edition platforms released by Oracle Corporation in the form of a binary product aimed at Java developers on Solaris, Linux, macOS or Windows. The JDK includes a private JVM and a few other resources to finish the development of a Java Application. Since the introduction of the Java platform, it has been by far the most widely used Software Development Kit (SDK). On 17 November 2006, Sun announced that they would release it under the GNU General Public License (GPL), thus making it free software. This happened in large part on 8 May 2007, when Sun contributed the source code to the OpenJDK.

In computer programming, an application programming interface (API) is a set of subroutine definitions, communication protocols, and tools for building software. In general terms, it is a set of clearly defined methods of communication among various components. A good API makes it easier to develop a computer program by providing all the building blocks, which are then put together by the programmer.

For several years parallel hardware was only available for distributed computing but recently it is becoming available for the low end computers as well. Hence it has become inevitable for software programmers to start writing parallel applications. It is quite natural for programmers to think sequentially and hence they are less acquainted with writing multi-threaded or parallel processing applications. Parallel programming requires handling various issues such as synchronization and deadlock avoidance. Programmers require added expertise for writing such applications apart from their expertise in the application domain. Hence programmers prefer to write sequential code and most of the popular programming languages support it. This allows them to concentrate more on the application. Therefore, there is a need to convert such sequential applications to parallel applications with the help of automated tools. The need is also non-trivial because large amount of legacy code written over the past few decades needs to be reused and parallelized.

CodeXL is an open-source software development tool suite that includes a GPU debugger, a GPU profiler, a CPU profiler, Graphics frame analyzer and a static shader/kernel analyzer.

References

  1. ↑ "Oracle® Developer Studio 12.5: Release Notes".
  2. ↑ "Systems Performance: Enterprise and the Cloud".
  3. ↑ "Java Performance: Hardware, Structures, and Algorithms".
  4. ↑ Schmidl, Dirk; Terboven, Christian; an Mey, Dieter; Müller, Matthias S. (2013). Suitability of Performance Tools for OpenMP Task-Parallel Programs. Proc. 7th Int'l Workshop on Parallel Tools for High Performance Computing. pp. 25–37.
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