Runtime Function Instrumentation with EZTrace

High-performance computing relies more and more on complex hardware: multiple computers, multi-processor computer, multi-core processing unit, multiple general purpose graphical processing units... To efficiently exploit the power of current computing architectures, modern applications rely on a high level of parallelism. To analyze and optimize these applications, tracking the software behavior with minimum impact on the software is necessary to extract time consumption of code sections as well as resource usage (e.g., network messages). In this paper, we present a method for instrumenting functions in a binary application. This method permits to collect data at the entry and the exit of a function, allowing to analyze the execution of an application. We implemented this mechanism in EZTrace and the evaluation shows a significant improvement compared to other tools for instrumentation.