Open|SpeedShop™ for Linux®

Open|SpeedShop is a project co-funded by the Department of Energy (DOE), managed by the Tri-laboratories of LLNL, LANL, and Sandia, and developed by SGI. Open|SpeedShop utilizes dynamic instrumentation technology developed at the Universities of Wisconsin and Maryland.

Open|SpeedShop is an open source multi platform Linux performance tool which is initially targeted to support performance analysis of applications running on both single node and large scale IA64, IA32, EM64T, and AMD64 platforms. It is explicitly designed with usability in mind and targets both application and computer scientists.

Open|SpeedShop's base functionality includes metrics like exclusive and inclusive user time, MPI call tracing, and CPU hardware performance counter experiments. In addition, Open|SpeedShop is designed to be modular and easily extendable. It supports several levels of plugins which allow users to add their own performance experiments.

The infrastructure and base components of Open|SpeedShop are being released open source under GPL and LGPL.

• Three modes of operation: batch, command line interface, and graphical user interface.
• Multiple platform single system image (SSI), traditional cluster, and SGI super cluster support.
• Support for large numbers of processes, threads, and ranks.
• Ability for users to create their own experiments via a well defined plugin facility.
• Ability to attach to running processes, threads, and ranks to gather performance data.
• Ability to view performance data for all of application's lifetime or smaller time slices.
• Ability to view performance data on demand (while the experiment is running).
• Ability to save and restore performance experiment data and symbol information to do post experiment performance analysis.
• Ability to compare performance results for processes, threads, ranks, or to compare current experiment results with previous experiment results.
• GUI Wizard facility and context sensitive help to aid in tools usability. Multiple usability studies have been conducted.
• CLI help facility which lists the CLI commands, syntax, and typical usage. Usability studies are underway.

Link to ISO Image

Here are quickstart directions for running Open|SpeedShop from the Live CD:

1. Burn the ISO image onto a physical CD.
2. Follow your operating system procedure for booting from the CD.
3. Follow the directions on the "Getting Started" web page that will apear once the CD has booted.

• Live cvs repository source

  Live developer cvs repository source access information is available for the Open|SpeedShop project.

• Open|SpeedShop 1.0 release rpms and source

  Open|SpeedShop 1.0 Downloads

Six Open|SpeedShop experiments are provided with the initial open source release. The following table shows the experiment and the proposed delivery schedule:

Information about the Open|SpeedShop Tutorial to be presented at ICS 2007 in Seattle, WA is now online!

Read the announcment regarding the award of the OpenSpeedShop contract to The Krell Institute, November 10, 2006

Read the Open|SpeedShop for Linux project announcement from October 20, 2004.

Read the Open|SpeedShop for Linux fact sheet (pdf).

Send an e-mail message to: oss-questions@openspeedshop.org