Paraver

Paraver was developed to respond to the need to have a qualitative global perception of the application behavior by visual inspection and then to be able to focus on the detailed quantitative analysis of the problems. Expressive power, flexibility and the capability of efficiently handling large traces are key features addressed in the design of Paraver. The clear and modular structure of Paraver plays a significant role towards achieving these targets.

Paraver is a very flexible data browser that is part of the CEPBA-Tools toolkit. Its analysis power is based on two main pillars. First, its trace format has no semantics; extending the tool to support new performance data or new programming models requires no changes to the visualizer, just to capture such data in a Paraver trace. The second pillar is that the metrics are not hardwired on the tool but programmed. To compute them, the tool offers a large set of time functions, a filter module, and a mechanism to combine two time lines. This approach allows displaying a huge number of metrics with the available data. To capture the experts knowledge, any view or set of views can be saved as a Paraver configuration file. After that, re-computing the view with new data is as simple as loading the saved file. The tool has been demonstrated to be very useful for performance analysis studies, giving much more details about the applications behaviour than most performance tools. Some Paraver features are the support for:

• Detailed quantitative analysis of program performance
• Concurrent comparative analysis of several traces
• Customizable semantics of the visualized information
• Cooperative work, sharing views of the tracefile
• Building of derived metrics