HP Caliper: An Architecture for Performance Analysis Tools

HP Caliper is an architecture for software developer tools that deal with executable (binary) programs. It provides a common framework that allows building of a wide variety of tools for doing performance analysis, profiling, coverage analysis, correctness checking, and testing. HP Caliper uses a technology known as dynamic instrumentation, which allows program instructions to be changed on-the-fly with instrumentation probes. Dynamic instrumentation makes HP Caliper easy to use: It requires no special preparation of an application, supports shared libraries, collects data for multiple threads, and has low intrusion and overhead. This paper describes HP Caliper for HP-UX, running on the IA-64 (Itanium) processor. It describes Caliper's architecture, dynamic instrumentation algorithm, and the experiences gathered during its implementation.