PAPI on Nehalem Xeon 3500?

[florina]

Hello,

I made a request to the HPC admins for a quad core linux development box. They can give me a system with a single socket Intel Nehalem Xeon 3500 quad core processor. From what I've seen on PAPI's homepage (http://icl.cs.utk.edu/papi/news/news.html?id=203) it appears that PAPI has support only for the Intel Core i7 (Nehalem) processor.

What would be the chances of PAPI being supported on the Intel Nehalem Xeon 3500 processor?

Thanks,
Florina

[Dan Terpstra]

Xeon is a marketing name. Nehalem is a product code name. Core i7 is the Nehalem family. It's all very confusing. Bottom line: PAPI supports Nehalem. It'll support your Xeon 3500. Available now from cvs, or RealSoonNow(TM) as PAPI 3.7.0.

[florina]

Dan,

thank you for your timely response and for the good news regarding Xeon 3500.
In an attempt to be able to use PAPI for programs running on more than just 4 cores, I will need to install PAPI on a smaller Linux cluster. The processor types vary among the nodes, but they all come down to:
Intel Xeon CPU 3.06GHz with 1.5GB memory (4 CPU cores), cpu family: 15, model: 2
Intel Xeon CPU 3.60GHz with 2.0GB memory (4 CPU cores except one node that has only 2 cores), , cpu family: 15, model: 4
Pentium III 1.4GHz with 0.5GB memory (single CPU), , cpu family: 6, model: 11

I don't know what Linux & kernel version they are running. Looking on PAPI's currently supported platforms, I believe Pentium III will be supported, but I am not 100% sure about the other two Xeon models. Do you know if PAPI supports these models?

Regards,
Florina

[Dan Terpstra]

Intel's family 15 is Pentium 4. Again, the Xeon nomenclature is basically just marketing for specific cache and clock configurations. All of these processors are supported individually by PAPI. But they can't be mixed in a single heterogeneous cluster and have the same PAPI binary library run on all of them. The performance counter architecture is radically different between PIII an P4. They require independent builds of the PAPI library to work correctly.

[florina]

Your answer is very encouraging. I will install individual PAPI libs as you suggested. I'll post any questions/problems in here.
Thank you.