Open|SpeedShop™ Invocation

Open|SpeedShop Invocation

• openss -gui

This invocation of Open|SpeedShop causes the GUI to be raised then a command panel is also created. This command panel window becomes the interactive CLI window. Under this invocation Open|SpeedShop interactive commands can be entered into the Graphical User Interface's command panel and have the same effect as if they were entered under the "openss -cli" option.

• openss -cli [ -online | -offline ]:

This invocation of Open|SpeedShop causes the window terminal becomes the interactive CLI window.

• openss -batch:

This invocation of Open|SpeedShop will execute a performance experiment. specified by additional arguments, directly without user interaction. The -batch operation can be used in scripts and batch processing environments.

• openss [ -offline ] -f "executable and arguments" experiment_type:

This invocation of Open|SpeedShop will execute the command following the -f parameter. The experiment type at the end is the collector used. As this collection method utilizes LD_PRELOAD to intercept calls, it must run during the entire execution time and will output files at the processor level that are post processed to add to the experiment database.

An important environment variable for this type of invocation is OPENSS_RAWDATA_DIR.  The OPENSS_RAWDATA_DIR variable must be defined within the user's environment before OpenSpeedShop is invoked if /tmp is not a shared file system across the cluster. If the OPENSS_RAWDATA_DIR environment variable is not defined in the user's current terminal session before the invocation of OpenSpeedShop, then all raw performance data files will be placed in /tmp/offline-oss which is expected to be shared file space.

Either the -gui or -cli interface can be brought up to load the experiment data for further analysis.

NOTE: In general, it is best if a user selects a target directory located where processor written files are best placed.

WARNING: Concurrent instances of OpenSpeedShop MUST have unique OPENSS_RAWDATA_DIR target values associated with each respective OpenSpeedShop instance. Also make sure the target exists.


These convenience scripts have been developed to hide some of the original command syntax, for example:

osspcsamp "executable"

can be used in place of:

openss -offline -f "executable" pcsamp

There is a convenience script for each of the Open|SpeedShop experiments and one for comparing two to eight Open|SpeedShop database files to each other.

• osspcsamp               - program counter sampling
  
• ossusertime             - call path profiling
  
• osshwc                     - hardware counter overflow/threshold sampling
  
• osshwctime              - hardware counter overflow/threshold sampling with call path profiling
• osshwcsamp             - hardware counter timer based sampling (up to six events for each run)
  
• ossio                        - Input/Output function tracing with call path profiling
  
• ossiot                       - Input/Output function tracing with call path profiling and I/O function argument info
  
• ossmpi                      - MPI function tracing with call path profiling
• ossmpit                     - MPI function tracing with call path profiling and MPI function argument info
• ossmpiot                   - MPI function tracing with call path profiling and OTF (Open Trace Format) file creation
  
• ossfpe                       - Floating point exeception tracing
• osscompare               - Compare Open|SpeedShop database files to each other (one performance analysis run to another, up to 8)
  

See the Quick Start Guide for latest syntax.

We suggest using the convenience scripts to gather the data and then use the GUI: openss -f <database file> to view the data.