Parallel Programming with Intel® Parallel Studio XE

Chapter 12

Event-Based Analysis with VTune Amplifier XE

What's in This Chapter?

Using the cycles per instruction retired (CPI) metric to spot potentially unhealthy programs

Using Amplifier XE's General Exploration analysis to identify performance issues in your program

Drilling down into architectural hotspots

Using Amplifier XE's APIs to control data collection

When we are ill, most of us know how to check the obvious. Do we have a fever? Are we aching anywhere? Is our pulse rate normal? Wouldn't it be great if there were an easy way of measuring the health of a program? The good news is that some equivalent indicators can be used to monitor the health of an application, and Amplifier XE can be used to get those measurements.

This chapter shows how to check the health of an application using Amplifier XE's architectural analysis types. Starting with a system-wide view of your system, you learn how to observe how well different programs are performing.

Target Architecture

The principles described in this chapter can be applied to any CPU architecture. However, Amplifier XE's architectural analysis features are specifically targeted at Intel devices. You will not be able to carry out the activities in this chapter on a non-Intel device.

Testing the Health of an Application

When looking at the health of an application, several facts need to be ascertained. Like people, each piece of software has its own unique traits. Even if two programs do the same thing — for example, predicting ...