PAPI 6.0.0 was released March 4, 2020. This release includes a new API for SDEs (Software Defined Events), a major revision of the 'high-level API', and several new components, including ROCM and ROCM_SMI (for AMD GPUs), powercap_ppc and sensors_ppc (for IBM Power9 and later), SDE, and the IO component (exposes I/O statistics exported by the Linux kernel). Furthermore, PAPI 6.0 ships CAT, a new Counter Analysis Toolkit that assists with native performance counter disambiguation through micro-benchmarks.

For specific and detailed information on changes made for this release, see ChangeLogP600.txt for filenames or keywords of interest and change summaries, or go directly to the PAPI git repository.


Some Major Changes for PAPI 6.0 include:

• Added the rocm component to support performance counters on AMD GPUs.
• Added the rocm_smi component; SMI is System Management Interface to monitor power usage on AMD GPUs, which is also writeable by the user, e.g. to reduce power consumption on non-critical operations.
• Added 'io' component to expose I/O statistics exported by the Linux kernel (/proc/self/io).
• Added 'SDE' component, Software Defined Events, which allows HPC software layers to expose internal performance-critical behavior via Software Defined Events (SDEs) through the PAPI interface.
• Added 'SDE API' to register performance-critical events that originate from HPC software layers, and which are recognized as 'PAPI counters' and, thus, can be monitored with the standard PAPI interface.
• Added powercap_ppc component to support monitoring and capping of power usage on IBM PowerPC architectures (Power9 and later) using the powercap interface exposed through the Linux kernel.
• Added 'sensors_ppc' component to support monitoring of system metrics on IBM PowerPC architectures (Power9 and later) using the opal/exports sysfs interface.
• Retired infiniband_umad component, it is superseded by infiniband.
• Revived PAPI's 'high-level API' to make it more intuitive and effective for novice users and quick event reporting.
• Added 'counter_analysis_toolkit' sub-directory (CAT): A tool to assist with native performance counter disambiguation through micro-benchmarks, which are used to probe different important aspects of modern CPUs, to aid the classification of native performance events.

Other Changes include:

• Standardized our environment variables and implemented a simplified, unified approach for specifying libraries necessary for components, with overrides possible for special circumstances. Eliminated component level 'configure' requirements.
• Corrected TLS issues (Thread Local Storage) and race conditions.
• Several bug fixes, documentation fixes and enhancements, improvements to README files for user instruction and code comments.

Acknowledgements:
This release is the result of efforts from many people. The PAPI team would like to express special Thanks to Vince Weaver, Stephane Eranian (for libpfm4), William Cohen, Steve Kaufmann, Phil Mucci, Kevin Huck, Yunqiang Su, Carl Love, Andreas Beckmann, Al Grant and Evgeny Shcherbakov.


To verify the integrity of the download, check the MD5 hash 'md5sum papi-6.0.0.tar.gz':

    67d06f70fca62f4fcc95672f197638a2