HPC Profiling Tools

There are plenty of HPC tools for profiling out there. Figuring out which one is good in what scenario and, more importantly, which one actually works with Julia is non-trivial. This page will try to provide helpful orientation.


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NVIDIA Nsight Systems

Good for: GPU, MPI

NVIDIA Nsight Systems is a powerful profiling tool for analyzing (multi-)GPU and/or MPI-parallel applications (the latter might be somewhat surprising). Especially useful when combined with NVTX.jl for manual instrumentation (you can name and even color sections of your code).

Examples:

Impressions:

Extrae

Good for: MPI, GPU, Threads

The Julia package Extrae.jl allows you to use Extrae for analyzing parallel Julia applications. It will produce trace files that can be visualized and analyzed with Paraver.

Noteworthy limitations:

Impressions (of Paraver):

Score-P

Good for: MPI

The Julia package ScoreP.jl allows you to use Score-P for analyzing MPI-parallel Julia applications. Output files are of type .cubex (profiling), which can be opened with, e.g., Cube or ParaProf, and .otf2 (tracing), which can be opened with, e.g., Vampir or Intel Trace Analyzer.

Noteworthy limitations:

Examples:

Impressions (of Cube and Vampir):

LIKWID

Good for: intra-node hardware-level profiling

LIKWID.jl, named after the underlying eponymous benchmarking suite LIKWID, enables (interactive) monitoring of the performance of arbitrary Julia functions on a hardware level by examining hardware performance counters inside of CPUs (and NVIDIA GPUs).

Noteworthy limitations:

Examples:

Impressions:

Intel VTune Profiler

Good for: serial, multithreading, GC

The Intel VTune Profiler is a nice tool, e.g., for finding hot spots in your code. It supports local and remote performance profiling. To make it work with Julia check out IntelITT.jl and our dedicated Intel VTune + Julia page.

Noteworthy limitations:

Examples:

Impressions:

Other tools

If you know something about the following tools, in particular if and how it supports Julia, please make a PR!

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