Figure 1 HP Caliper Components (User Interfaces)

HP Caliper CLI

Performance

HP Caliper GUI

 

 

 

X11

reports

 

 

 

 

 

(local)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

server

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

HP Caliper

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Application

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

HP Caliper GUI

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

(remote)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

HP Caliper database(s)

Integrity Server (HP-UX or Linux)

X86 desktop

(Windows or Linux)

HP Caliper selectively measures the processes, threads, and load modules of your application. HP Caliper performs data collection in one of two modes:

•System-wide: In a system-wide measurement, HP Caliper measures activity across the entire system, and attributes measurements to the kernel and individual processes where possible.

•Per-process: In a per-process measurement, HP Caliper tracks individual processes and their children and measures each separately.

HP Caliper uses the performance monitoring unit (PMU) of the Itanium processor family to gather the requested performance data. This is done primarily through non-intrusive sampling, both time-based and event-based, as well as exact counts of particular metrics. HP Caliper provides data on hundreds of events monitored by the PMU.

On HP-UX, it also uses dynamic instrumentation of code for some measurements. It only instruments the portions of the application that actually get executed, thus eliminating unnecessary instrumentation overhead.

Reports show measured data by thread, load module, function, statement, and instruction.

HP Caliper uses a single command (called caliper) for all measurements. You specify the type of measurement and the target program as command-line arguments.

For example:

$ caliper myprog

This command uses a default measurement called scgprof to produce a sampled call graph profile of the program myprog. The result of the measurement (the output) is saved automatically in a database. The output database is called scgprof and is placed in a databases directory in your current directory unless you specify otherwise.

By default, a text report describing the results of the measurement run is sent to stdout.

Using the HP Caliper GUI, you have access to all of HP Caliper's features and options using intuitive menus and buttons.

HP Caliper has many types of preconfigured measurements that can be performed on a program. For example, there are measurements to determine cache misses, stalls, and call graphs. You can further customize your measurements by using HP Caliper options as parameters to the caliper command.

18 HP Caliper at a Glance