Intel® Trace Analyzer and Collector enables you to understand MPI application behavior, quickly find bottlenecks and achieve high performance for parallel cluster applications.

Use this tool to:

Intel® Trace Analyzer and Collector is installed as part of Intel® Parallel Studio XE Cluster Edition.

Prerequisites

Set up the environment sourcing the psxevars.[c]sh script available at <install_dir>/parallel_studio_xe_2016.x.xxx/bin.

By default, <install_dir> is:

This will set the required environment variables for compilers, Intel® MPI Library and Intel® Trace Analyzer and Collector, and you will be ready to trace your applications.

For system requirements, see the product Release Notes.

Get Started

Intel® Trace Analyzer Summary Page

1. Trace Your Application

Run your MPI application using the mpirun command with the -trace option to generate a trace file. For example:

$ mpirun -trace -n 4 ./myApp

A trace file .stf will be generated, for example myApp.stf. For more details on tracing, see Intel® Trace Collector Help.

2. Analyze the Application Behavior

  1. Open the generated .stf file in Intel Trace Analyzer:

    $ traceanalyzer ./myApp.stf

  2. Start analyzing your application using various charts and timelines. As a starting point use the Summary Page to get the following information:

    • General information about your application
    • Recommendations on where to start the analysis

For detailed description of the available charts and diagrams see Intel® Trace Analyzer Help.

 

 

Key Features

Interface and Displays

  • Intel® Trace Analyzer and Collector includes full-color customizable GUI with many charts and drill-down view options.
  • The analyzer is able to extremely rapidly unwind the call stack and use debug information to map instruction addresses to source code.
  • With both command-line and GUI interfaces, you can additionally set up batch runs or do interactive debugging.

Learn more...

MPI Correctness Checking

  • The MPI Correctness Checker detects deadlocks, data corruption, and errors with MPI parameters, data types, buffers, communicators, point-to-point messages and collective operations.
  • The Correctness Checker enables you to scale to extremely large systems and detect errors even among a large number of processes.

Learn more...

Performance Assistant

See performance issues in your application using the Performance Assistant, which provides the following information:

  • Detailed description of the issue and recommendations on how to resolve it.
  • Information about the affected processes.
  • Regions in the source code that caused the issue.

Learn more...

MPI Performance Snapshot

  • The MPI Performance Snapshot (MPS) is a scalable lightweight performance tool for MPI applications. It collects a variety of MPI application statistics (such as communication, activity, and load balance) and presents it in an easy-to-read format.
  • MPS combines lightweight statistics from the Intel® MPI Library with OS and hardware-level counters to provide you with high-level categorization of your application.

Learn more...

Ideal Environment Simulation

  • Understand application imbalance and estimate a potential application speedup after MPI implementation tuning and/or network upgrades by using the Idealization capability. Learn more...
  • Write your own simulators using the Custom Plug-in Framework API. Custom developed simulators can interact with trace files from the Intel® Trace Analyzer and can model any condition you can think of. Learn more...

User-Level Instrumentation

  • Control the profiling library and record user-defined activities, define groups of processes, define performance counters and record their values using the Intel® Trace Collector API.
  • Automatically instrument your application functions with the Intel® compilers, which are able to insert instrumentation probes calling the Intel® Trace Collector API.

Learn more...

Documentation and Resources

All the documentation is installed at: <install_dir>/documentation_2016/en/itac, where the default <install_dir> is opt/intel.

Document Description
Intel® Trace Analyzer and Collector README

This document contains brief overview of the product, directory map for key product components, and pointers to other sources of information.
Intel® Trace Analyzer and Collector Release Notes This document contains the most up-to-date information about the product, including: overview, features, system requirements and known limitations.
Intel® Trace Analyzer and Collector Installation Guide This document contains information on obtaining, installing, and uninstalling Intel® Trace Analyzer and Collector and getting technical support.
Intel® Trace Analyzer User and Reference Guide (HTML) (PDF) This document contains all the information related to Intel Trace Analyzer.
Intel® Trace Collector User and Reference Guide (HTML) (PDF) This document contains all the information related to Intel Trace Collector.
MPI Performance Snapshot User's Guide This document provides instructions on how to use MPI Performance Snapshot and describes its functionality.
Tutorial: Analyzing MPI Applications with MPI Performance Snapshot This tutorial describes how to conduct a simple analysis of an MPI application using MPI Performance Snapshot.
Intel® Trace Analyzer and Collector FAQ

This document contains answers the most frequently asked questions.
Index of Tutorials This document provides short descriptions of and links to the Intel® Trace Analyzer and Collector tutorials.

Intel® Trace Analyzer and Collector Web page

 Intel® Trace Analyzer and Collector product page. See this page for support and online documentation.