A universal interface for hardware counters to monitor software performance

Area: Development tools

CASS member: STEP

Description

The Performance API (PAPI) is a software library that offers a universal interface for accessing hardware counters, enabling the measurement and optimization of software performance across various computing architectures. Specifically, PAPI enables monitoring of low-level performance metrics and offers power management support, including reading and capping, for the latest CPUs and GPUs from various hardware vendors. It also provides insights into network congestion for different interconnects and supports monitoring of I/O activities. Lastly, PAPI’s software-defined event support helps uncover critical software events from various libraries and runtimes.

Target audience

PAPI is intended for use by the performance tool community, scientific application teams, math library developers, runtime system engineers, and HPC centers.

Additional resources

Impact stories