Using Hardware Performance Monitor (HPM) Toolkit: A primer
last update: 01/14/2009

Examining program performance with HPM Toolkit

The Hardware Performance Monitor (HPM) Toolkit measures the performance of codes running on IBM POWER6 systems. It has three parts:

The HPMCOUNT utility (i.e. command /usr/bin/hpmcount) starts your job, and at completion it reports wall clock time, hardware performance counters information, derived hardware metrics, and resource usage statistics for your code as a whole.

The LIBHPM instrumentation library provides subroutines that allow you to instrument sections of your code to generate statistics and present summaries of that information for each instrumented section of code. This library supports serial and parallel (threaded, OpenMP, MPI, and hybrid) applications written in Fortran, C, and C++. On bluefire, the libraries libhpm.a and its thread-safe counterpart libhpm_r.a are located in directory /usr/lib.

The HPMVIZ graphical user interface, later known as PerfPeek, graphically displays the performance file generated by LIBHPM. NOTE: Neither HPMVIZ nor PerfPeek are presently installed on bluefire

This collection of programs, provided by the IBM Advanced Computing Technology Center (ACTC) organization, allows you to instrument your code with library calls that collect hardware data during the execution of your code. These data are statistically summarized and written to your current working directory at the end of your job run. You can set a number of options to control what hardware features are instrumented and sampled. Please see the IBM HPM Toolkit Version 3.2.2 document Hardware Performance Monitor (HPM) Toolkit.

for information on these options and others supported by the library

IBM's HPM Toolkit website is at http://www.alphaworks.ibm.com/tech/hpmtoolkit

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