HP Caliper User Guide Release 5.5 (5900-2351, August 2012)

Figure 1 HP Caliper Components (User Interfaces)
HP Caliper CLI
Performance
reports
HP Caliper
database(s)
Integrity Server (HP-UX or Linux)
X86 desktop
(Windows or Linux)
Application
HP Caliper
HP Caliper GUI
(local)
HP Caliper GUI
(remote)
X11
server
HP Caliper selectively measures the processes, threads, and load modules of your application. HP
Caliper performs data collection in one of two modes:
• System-wide: In a system-wide measurement, HP Caliper measures activity across the entire
system, and attributes measurements to the kernel and individual processes where possible.
• Per-process: In a per-process measurement, HP Caliper tracks individual processes and their
children and measures each separately.
HP Caliper uses the performance monitoring unit (PMU) of the Itanium processor family to gather
the requested performance data. This is done primarily through non-intrusive sampling, both
time-based and event-based, as well as exact counts of particular metrics. HP Caliper provides
data on hundreds of events monitored by the PMU.
On HP-UX, it also uses dynamic instrumentation of code for some measurements. It only instruments
the portions of the application that actually get executed, thus eliminating unnecessary
instrumentation overhead.
Reports show measured data by thread, load module, function, statement, and instruction.
HP Caliper uses a single command (called caliper) for all measurements. You specify the type
of measurement and the target program as command-line arguments.
For example:
$ caliper myprog
This command uses a default measurement called scgprof to produce a sampled call graph
profile of the program myprog. The result of the measurement (the output) is saved automatically
in a database. The output database is called scgprof and is placed in a databases directory in
your current directory unless you specify otherwise.
By default, a text report describing the results of the measurement run is sent to stdout.
Using the HP Caliper GUI, you have access to all of HP Caliper's features and options using intuitive
menus and buttons.
HP Caliper has many types of preconfigured measurements that can be performed on a program.
For example, there are measurements to determine cache misses, stalls, and call graphs. You can
further customize your measurements by using HP Caliper options as parameters to the caliper
command.
What Is HP Caliper? 17