Documention for pfmon (IA-64)

pfmon is a tool for performance monitoring of unmodified binaries on IA-64/Linux. It's a very helpful tool for those who wish to measure the performance of an application using hardware performance counters. You don't need to make any changes to your application or relink with special libraries in order to use pfmon.

pfmon is available on the NCSA SGI Altix system (Cobalt) and the Itanium 2 TeraGrid cluster (Mercury).

On Cobalt, pfmon is included in your default PATH, so you can start using it without changing your environment. On Mercury, pfmon is located in the directory:

/usr/projects/perftools/perfmon/bin

The version of pfmon that is available on Cobalt and Mercury is version 2.0.

Please note that SGI has modified pfmon slightly to accommodate features of the Altix system, so that versions compiled from the standard open source version of pfmon may not work properly; therefore, you should use the SGI version of pfmon on that platform.

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The perfmon project web site provides a great deal of information about the software as well as examples of use. Perfmon is the IA-64/Linux performance monitoring infrastructure of which pfmon is a part.

You can read a description of pfmon written by the author of the tool in this excerpt from the book ia-64 linux kernel.

You may also find the paper A Methodology for using the Itanium 2 Performance Counters for Bottleneck Analysis, by Sverre Jarp of HP Labs, useful in learning more about using pfmon for application performance analysis.

pfmon: IA-64 Performance Monitoring