PAPI for system wide profiling!

[aehusain]

Dear All,

I am a newbie towards using PAPI interface. MY intension is to get system-wide profile information for some significant systems related to CPU, Cache and Disk. I have used Oprofile before to acheive the same task. I was wondering if using PAPI I can write a code to get system wide profile information accesing the hardware performance counters related to this system event. If yes, is this better or efficient way to do than doing it through Oprofile.

Thanks in advance for your suggestions and help!

Regards,
Ata E Husain

[Dan Terpstra]

In general, PAPI measures counter information at the process or thread level. It doesn't do system wide measurements. If you want to know specifically what your code is doing, PAPI is a great way to collect that data. If you want to measure what's happening on the whole system, Oprofile is the better choice.

[aehusain]

Thanks Dan!

[jdmccalpin]

If you are using the perfctr layer underneath PAPI, you can try the system wide profiling sample program in the $PERFCTR/examples/global/ directory.
The sample code is set up to report global counts for one performance monitor event for all processors every five seconds, but the details are easy to change.