GettingStarted

Getting started with TAU

This is a short guide to using TAU. Download both PDT and TAU.

%> tar -xzf pdtoolkit-3.11
%> cd pdtoolkit
%> ./configure
%> make all install
%> cd ..
%> tar -xzf tau2.16.5
%> cd tau2
%> ./configure -pdt=[PDT directory] -mpiinc=[MPI include] -mpilib=[MPI library]
%> make clean install

This a basic configuration of TAU, there are many more options. TAU executables are placed in a directory based on your platform like x86_64 (replace this with your own platform). Let us add the bin directory to our path.

%> export PATH=[path to tau2]/tau2/x86_64/bin:$PATH

We can use TAU's compiler scripts (tau_cc.sh, tau_cxx.sh, and tau_f90.sh) to build our application. These scripts automatically link-in TAU's instrumentation libraries as well as the MPI libraries. But first we need to tell TAU which instrumentation library to use, we do this by setting the TAU_MAKEFILE environment variable. If you would like to set some options you can use the TAU_OPTIONS environment variable.

%> export TAU_MAKEFILE=[path to tau2]/tau2/x86_64/lib/Makefile.tau-mpi-pdt
%> tau_cxx.sh -c foo.cpp -o foo.o
%> tau_cxx.sh foo.o -o foo
%> mpirun -np 4 ./foo

If you run into any linker errors make sure that TAU is being built with the same compilers as your mpi implementation. Use the -cc=, -c++= and fortran= compiler options, Like to use Intel's compilers type:

%> ./configure -pdt=[PDT directory] -mpiinc=[MPI include] -mpilib=[MPI library] \
   -cc=icc -c++=icpc -fortran=intel
%> make clean install

and then we also need to set TAU_MAKEFILE to this new instrumentation library,

%> export TAU_MAKEFILE=[path to tau2]/tau2/x86_64/lib/Makefile.tau-icpc-mpi-pdt

Afterwards we have successfully build and run our application we can view the performance data by using pprof:

%> pprof