What is the TAU Portable Profiling Package?

There are many components that are compatible with the TAU tool framework. The TAU Portable Profiling Package is one component that can be used as part of the entire TAU framework, or as a standalone tool. It is currently designed to instrument parallel multi-threaded, C++ code. In HPC++ terminology, TAU can maintain performance data for each thread, context, and node. The API for using TAU is small.  It can be added to existing C++ libraries and frameworks very quickly, and can be excluded at compile time, for optimized performance without profiling.

TAU Portable Profiling Features:

• Profiles for EACH unique template instantiation
• Time spent exclusively and inclusively in each function
• Start/Stop timers
• Profiling data maintained for each thread, context, and node
• Parallel IO Statistics for the number of calls for each profiled function
• Profiling groups for organizing and controlling instrumentation
• Support for using CPU hardware counters
• Graphic display for parallel profiling data