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

In general, HP Caliper runs do one of the following:
• Collect data
• Collect data and generate a report
• Generate a report based on previously collected data
• Analyze previously collected data
For the last item above, HP Caliper provides the HP Caliper Advisor, a rules-based expert system
designed to provide guidance about improving the performance of an application. Users can write
their own rules to analyze applications or use the default rules provided.
The latest version of HP Caliper is available on the HP Caliper home page at:
http://hp.com/go/caliper
What Does HP Caliper Run On?
Supported Hardware and Operating Systems
HP Caliper is supported on HP Integrity systems. HP Caliper does not measure programs compiled
for PA-RISC processors.
HP Caliper is supported on these operating systems:
• HP-UX 11i v2 or later
• Linux version 2.6: RedHat4, Debian 3.0, and SuSE Enterprise Linux 9
HP Caliper can be used in an Integrity Virtual Machine environment on a guest system.
Supported Compilers and Application Environments
On HP-UX, HP Caliper is formally supported for HP C/aC++ and HP Fortran. (These are also the
compilers it is bundled with.) HP Caliper measures code generated by these native and cross
compilers, including inlined functions and C++ exceptions. Instrumentation-based measurements
will only work on applications compiled on these compilers.
On Linux, HP Caliper has been primarily validated with code produced with gcc and g++, and
minimally tested with code produced from the Intel icc compiler.
HP Caliper can generally be used on:
• Programs compiled using HP, Intel, and GNU compilers, with and without optimization.
• Assembly and Java programs.
• Stripped programs, and programs compiled with optimization or debug information or both.
This includes support for both the +objdebug and +noobjdebug options.
• Both ILP32 (+DD32) and LP64 (+DD64) programs, both 32-bit and 64-bit ELF formats.
• Archive-, minshared- or shared-bound executables.
• Single-process and multiprocess applications.
• Single-threaded and multithreaded applications, including MxN threads.
• Applications that fork or vfork or exec themselves or other executables.
• Shell scripts and the programs they spawn.
• Main, static, and dynamic shared libraries.
• Entire run, partial run, and server/daemon programs.
18 HP Caliper at a Glance