TAU'S Performance CCA Component

http://www.cs.uoregon.edu/research/paracomp/tau/cca/

The TAU performance observation component provides measurement capabilities to components. It aids in selection of components and helps create performance aware intelligent components. The Measurement port of the performance component provides Timer, Query, Control and Event interfaces. The Timer interface allows us to track performance data associated with a region of code by bracketing it with start and stop methods. The TAU implementation of this generic performance component interface supports both profiling and tracing measurement options. Profiling records aggregate inclusive and exclusive wallclock time, process virtual time, hardware performance metrics such as data cache misses and floating point instructions executed, as well as a combination of multiple performance metrics. The Query interface supports both runtime and post-mortem access to these metrics for making intelligent decisions regarding the suitability of a component. The Control interface allows the user to control the instrumentation by enabling or disabling one or more groups of timers and provides runtime instrumentation control capabilities to components. The Event interface helps track application and runtime system level atomic events and enables tracking events such as memory utilization and the extent of inter-process message communication. The performance component enables better integration of performance tools by separating the common interface from its underlying implementation. Thus, the performance component aids in the process of performance evaluation of component software.