- Innovative Computing Laboratory - academic research in enabling technology and high performance computing

The Innovative Computing Laboratory (ICL) aspires to be a world leader in enabling technologies and software for scientific computing. Our vision is to provide high performance tools to tackle science’s most challenging problems and to play a major role in the development of standards for scientific computing in general.

ICL is part of the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Department in the College of Engineering at the University of Tennessee and serves as the cornerstone laboratory of the Center for Information Technology Research (CITR), one of UT's nine Centers of Excellence.

The Performance API (PAPI) project specifies a standard application programming interface (API) for accessing hardware performance counters available on most modern microprocessors. These counters exist as a small set of registers that count Events , occurrences of specific signals related to the processor's function. Monitoring these events facilitates correlation between the structure of source/object code and the efficiency of the mapping of that code to the underlying architecture. This correlation has a variety of uses in performance analysis including hand tuning, compiler optimization, debugging, benchmarking, monitoring and performance modeling. In addition, it is hoped that this information will prove useful in the development of new compilation technology as well as in steering architectural development towards alleviating commonly occurring bottlenecks in high performance computing.

The inaugural release of Component PAPI represents a significant architectural change from PAPI 3.7.x and earlier. See the Component PAPI, or PAPI-C, or PAPI 4.0.0 release announcement for more information.

» Visit the PAPI web page or the PAPI User Forum