For medium-large targets, several methods are available to minimize the amount of data collected and target execution time. Minimizing the data collected reduces the amount of data you need to examine; it also reduces the size of the generated result.
Using Annotations
The Trip Counts tool recognizes the following annotations:
Pause Collection: Stops data collection to skip uninteresting parts of the target program's execution. This minimizes the data collected and speeds up the analysis of medium-large applications.
Resume Collection: Resumes data collection previously paused to collect data about the interesting parts of your program.
Using Collection Controls
The Trip Counts tool provides several ways to start target execution with data collection paused or paused for a specified time: from the GUI, using an Intel Advisor Option, or a command line option. Starting collection paused for a specified time enables you to automatically skip data/program initialization and related setup steps without modifying your source code so that the start events are not analyzed. Starting collection paused (without a time) lets you automatically skip data/program initialization and related setup steps but your target needs to execute a Resume Collection annotation or accept "resume" command from CLI or GUI.
The Trip Counts tool also provides Pause and Resume (collection) buttons in the Workflow tab that are equivalent to executing the Pause Collection and Resume Collection annotations. You might use these GUI buttons instead of the annotations in certain cases, such as your initial profiling runs.
The recommended method is to:
Do one of the following to start the tool and target execution:
In the Workflow tab, click the
button below
Trip Counts.
Before you run the tool, enable the equivalent Automatically resume collection after (sec) checkbox in the Analysis Target tab of the Project Properties dialog box to start collection paused for a specified time.
On the command line, use --collect with either the --start-paused or --resume-after options.
If you use the
button or
--start-paused option, execute the Resume Collection annotation to begin data collection of the first interesting part of the program.
Execute pairs of Pause Collection and Resume Collection annotations to collect data about the interesting part(s) of the target program. Place Pause Collection and Resume Collection annotations outside the parallel regions.
To set the duration of data collection and exclude some post-processing activities from data collection:
- in GUI: Project Properties -> Analysis Target -> Trip Counts and FLOP Analysis -> Automatically stop collection after (sec).
- in CLI: --duration