Trident: Automated system tool for collecting and analyzing hardware performance counters

Trident, a tool to use low level metrics derived from hardware counters to understand Core, Memory and I/O utilisation and bottlenecks. The collection of time series of these low level counters does not induce significant overhead to the execution of the application. The Understanding Performance team is investigation on a new node characterization tool, `Trident', that can look at various low level metrics with respect to the Core, Memory and I/O. Trident uses a three pronged approach to analysing node's utilisation and understand the stress on different parts of the node based on the given job. Currently core metrics such as memory bandwidth, core utilization, active processor cycles, etc., are being collected. Interpretation of the data is often non intuitive. The tool converts the data into derived metrics that are then represented as a system wide top-down analysis that helps developers and site managers understand the application behavior without the need for in-depth expertise of architecture details.