Detailed program analysis of massively parallel programs
requires the recording of event based performance data during
run-time and its visualisation with appropriate software tools
like the Vampir framework.
The specification of a powerful trace file format has to
fulfill a large number of requirements. It must allow an
efficient collection of the event based performance data on a
parallel program environment. On the other hand it has to
provide a fast and comprehensive access to the large amount of
performance data and the corresponding event definitions by the
analysis software tools.
To improve scalability for very large and massively parallel
traces the Open Trace Format (OTF) is developed at ZIH as a
successor format to the Vampir Trace Format (VTF3).
The Open Trace Format makes use of a portable ASCII encoding.
It distributes single traces to multiple so called streams with
one or more files each. Merging of records from multiple files
is done transparently by the OTF library. The number of
possible streams is not limited by the number of available file
handles.
The read/write library should be used as a portable interface
for third party software. The library supports efficient
parallel and distributed access to trace data and offers
selective reading access regarding arbitrary time intervals,
process selection and record types. Optional auxiliary
information can assist this selective access.
The software package contains additional tools for trace date
conversion or preparation. More information can be found in the
provided documentation.
The OTF software is developed in cooperation with the University of Oregon and the Lawrence Livermore National Lab. It is
available as open source software under the BSD license.
Latest stable release:
A list of all important changes can be found in the
file ChangeLog.
Previous releases:
Older stable releases are still available in the archive.
The contact person for questions and suggestions is A. Knuepfer.
Staff:
- Dr. Andreas Knüpfer
- Ronny Brendel
- Johannes Spazier
- Matthias Jurenz
- Bert Wesarg
- Robert Dietrich
- Jens Doleschal
- Thomas Ilsche
- Mathias Korepkat
- André Groetzsch
- Michael Heyde
- Dr. Michael Kluge
- Holger Mickler
- Johannes Ziegenbalg
- Dr. Holger Brunst
- Dr. Hartmut Mix
servicedesk@tu-dresden.de