Comparing Allinea"s and Intel"s Performance Tools for HPC

Abstract

To efficiently use HPC machines, it is critical to optimize applications for high performance. To accomplish this, HPC developers must utilize performance tools to find and correct performance problems within large, complex scientific applications. Allinea and Intel offer vendor-supported performance tools that are regularly updated to capture important performance metrics on the latest hardware. In this paper, the authors evaluated and compared Allinea's MAP performance tool and Intel's performance tools to aid in application optimization. The authors found that Allinea's MAP provided useful performance metrics necessary to diagnose and fix performance problems using an intuitive, easy-to-use user interface. Intel's performance tools provided a more detailed and customizable view of application performance, at the expense of a more complicated user interface. The comparison presented in this paper will help HPC developers decide which performance tool is best for them.