The monitoring request interface (MRI)

In this paper, we present MRI, a high level interface for selective monitoring of code regions and data structures in single and multiprocessor environments. MRI keeps transparent the available monitoring resources from the performance analysis tools and can electively generate monitoring results as online profile information, or as postmortem traces. MRI is the first step toward a standard monitoring interface which can be used by a broad range of performance analysis tools, from profiler tools, trace producers and visualizers, up to complex automatic performance analyzers. We also present an implementation of MRI for SMPs which transparently use a simulation backend and a PAPI backend to obtain performance data.