Jean Zay : ITAC

Introduction

ITAC (Intel Trace Analyzer Collector) is a graphical tool (GUI) from Intel Parallel Studio XE that provide understanding of MPI application behaviour.

Installed versions

  • Several versions of ITAC are available depending on versions of Intel Parallel Studio XE installed on the machine.

Usage

The module command allows access to different versions of ITAC.

To display the different versions available, you have two possibilities:

  • Via the corresponding modulefiles :
    $ module av intel-itac
    intel-itac/2018.1(18.0.1)  intel-itac/2019.2(19.0.2)  intel-itac/2019.5(19.0.5)  intel-itac/2020.1
    intel-itac/2018.4(18.0.5)  intel-itac/2019.4(19.0.4)  intel-itac/2020.0          intel-itac/2020.2
  • or via the Intel environments :
    $ module av intel-all
    intel-all/2018.1(18.0.1)  intel-all/2019.2(19.0.2)  intel-all/2019.5 (19.0.5)  intel-all/2020.1
    intel-all/2018.5(18.0.5)  intel-all/2019.4(19.0.4)  intel-all/2020.0           intel-all/2020.2

For example, to use the ITAC 2020.2 version, you can use either:

  • The corresponding modulefile :
    $ module load intel-itac/2020.2
  • Or the corresponding Intel environment :
    $ module load intel-all/2020.2

Note that the intel-all/XX.Y.Z modules contain the complete Intel environments including the compilers, MKL mathematical library, the MPI library and the code analysis tools.

After the chosen module is loaded, the usage of ITAC is done in tree steps:

  1. Rebuilding of your binary file.
  2. Running of your binary file.
  3. Visualisation/Analysis of results with the graphical interface.

Compilation

You have to add option -tcollect to Intel compiler to make the compilation.

$ module load intel-itac/2020.2
$ mpiifort ... source.f90 -tcollect -o my_exe
 
$ mpiicc ... source.c -tcollect -o my_exe
 
$ mpiicpc ... source.C -tcollect -o my_exe

Execution

The code run can be done in interactive way or in batch way (a Slurm job) via srun command and under the same Intel environment as to make compilation:

$ module load intel-itac/2020.2
$ srun ... my_exe

Note : the run generates an analysis file with a name composed by executable name and .stf suffix (for this example my_exe.stf).

Important : The Intel environment used at this step must be the same as the one used to do the compilation.

Analysis/visualisation of results

The results analysis is done via the traceanalyzer graphical interface (GUI) by specifying the name of the analysis file written during the execution.

To use the same version 2020.2 as the one used to do the compilation and the sampling, you must use the following commands:

$ module load intel-itac/2020.2
$ traceanalyzer exe.stf

Important : The Intel environment used at this step must be the same as the one used to do the sampling and compilation.

Documentation