Open Trace Format (OTF)

Detailed program analysis of massively parallel programs requires the recording of event based performance data during run-time and its visualisation with appropriate software tools like the Vampir framework.

The specification of a convenient and powerful trace file format has to fulfill a large number of requirements. It must allow an efficient collection of the event based performance data on a parallel program environment. On the other hand it has to provide a very fast and convenient access to the large amount of performance data and the corresponding event definitions by the analysis software tools.

To improve scalability for very large and massively parallel traces the Open Trace Format (OTF) has been developed at ZIH as a successor format to the Vampir Trace Format (VTF3).

The Open Trace Format makes use of a portable ASCII encoding. It distributes single traces to multiple so called streams with one or more files each. Merging of records from multiple files is done transparently by the OTF library. The number of possible streams is not limited by the number of available file handles.

The provided read/write library should be used as a convenient interface for third party software. The library supports efficient parallel and distributed access to trace data and offers selective reading access regarding arbitrary time intervals, process selection and record types.
Optional auxiliary information can assist this selective access.

The software package contains additional tools for trace date conversion or preparation.
More information can be found in the provided documentation.

OTF version is available as open source software under the BSD license, see 'COPYING'. The software comes as a source code package. It can be installed by using autoconf procedures, see 'INSTALL'.