instruction histogram

[mahmood]

Dear all
I want to know if PAPI is able to create a histogram of retired instruction. This will help to find if a program is branch intensive, load/store intensive, integer ALU intensive and so on. Will PAPI do that?

[danterpstra]

PAPI counts events. Those events could be retired instructions, retired branches, retired loads, etc. Depending on how many counters your processor supports and which events are countable by that processor, it would be possible to count events in each of these categories and build your own histogram.

[mahmood]

Let me ask in this way.
Suppose a program contains:
add....
mov...
fadd....
load....
mov...
load....

What I want is this histogram:
add: 1
fadd: 1
mov: 2
load: 2

Is PAPI capable of doing that?

[vweaver1]

no, PAPI cannot do that.

You want a tool like Intel's pin which I think includes a tool that does exactly what you describe.

[mahmood]

ok I will ask them. thanks