topic Re: ISA profiling through hardware counters? in Analyzers

ISA profiling through hardware counters?

Theo-at-Stillwater — Sun, 06 Jul 2008 17:48:08 GMT

Inearly versions of VTune that I used one could use hardware counters. I want to do an ISA profiling study on different open source climate models and I downloaded V9 to set up that experiment, but out of the box it does not seem to support hardware counters: it only exposes the OS counters. The old style VTune used a Performance DLL to enable the hardware counters and present them through the OS counter API, but I can't find any documentation where to find those DLLs that support the hardware counters of the processor or how to install them.

Anyone care to point me to the link that has this information? Thanks in advance.

Re: ISA profiling through hardware counters?

TimP — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 03:50:09 GMT

I can agree that it's sometimes difficult to adjust to the changes in the way VTune works, but I think 9.0 isan improvement over 8.x. I'm not sure whether you mean that you are getting a message that your CPU architecture isn't supported, or whether you are having difficulty finding the event counter selections. VTune doesn't support pre-production CPUs.

Event counters may be added or removed by right clicking on the "Profile" selection in the toolbar, which should give a reconfigure menu with 3 choices in the left column, one of which is events. Under events, there is an "all events" menu, and sub-menus which show just events in certain categories. The PTU relative of VTune has a "filter" option which permits you to view your choice of event groups, for example, all L2, or all DTLB events.

Re: ISA profiling through hardware counters?

Theo-at-Stillwater — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 17:26:26 GMT

I have been hovering over all the buttons in the toolbar but none of them show a label of"profile", so I need a little bit more information what the "profile selection in the toolbar" refers to. I did find the Configure dialogs but on the counter sampling configuration only shows OS counters. The sampling configuration does show events but 1- I haven't figured out yet how to use them, and 2- since the application goes through multiple phases I need a time display of instruction counts so that I can label the proper phases with the right ISA statistics.

I am sure it can be done, but the questions I ask of the help system seem not to reveal any useful information as of yet of how to configure VTUne for ISA studies. If there is a white paper or "how to" I am all ears.

Looking forward to your reply,