All new modern processors have hardware support for monitoring processor performance. In this project, we try to explore use of VTune Performance Analyzer for hardware-based performance monitoring of a Linux cluster of Pentium 4 Xeon processors.

Performance management can be broken into three sequential processes: performance monitoring, performance analysis, and performance modeling. (Fig. 1) Monitoring is the theme of this issue, analysis refers to the capability of looking for patterns in monitored data that reside in a database, while modeling attempts to use monitored data to predict future events, such as resource bottlenecks. PD...