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Section: New Software and Platforms

tiptop

Keywords: Instructions - Cycles - Cache - CPU - Performance - HPC - Branch predictor

Scientific Description: Tiptop is a new simple and flexible user-level tool that collects hardware counter data on Linux platforms (version 2.6.31+) and displays them in a way simple to the Linux "top" utility. The goal is to make the collection of performance and bottleneck data as simple as possible, including simple installation and usage. No privilege is required, any user can run tiptop.

Tiptop is written in C. It can take advantage of libncurses when available for pseudo-graphic display. Installation is only a matter of compiling the source code. No patching of the Linux kernel is needed, and no special-purpose module needs to be loaded.

Current version is 2.3.1, released October 2017. Tiptop has been integrated in major Linux distributions, such as Fedora, Debian, Ubuntu.

Functional Description: Today's microprocessors have become extremely complex. To better understand the multitude of internal events, manufacturers have integrated many monitoring counters. Tiptop can be used to collect and display the values from these performance counters very easily. Tiptop may be of interest to anyone who wants to optimise the performance of their HPC applications.