Why do some great ideas take so long to happen? Here are three genuinely useful and free tools that give quick, painless, and useful information to software developers seeking to optimize big data or HPC applications. Any gamer, race car driver, fighter jet pilot, or medical practitioner will rely on some sort of display of important data to look at quickly and make decisions. It makes me wonder why it took so long for software developers to have a performance snapshot from the Intel® VTune™ Amplifier tool? Well, we have it now, at least if we try it out and encourage Intel to keep it! For my money, nothing is more valuable than knowing what’s really going on when you run an application. For performance tuning, that means poking around until you find something unexpected or undesirable. It’s that “tip of the iceberg” sighting that gives us a clue where to spend our time tuning. Intel is touting a performance snapshot capability that really can give us a leg up – because it collects the “usual suspects” for us quickly, and lets us explore them to find out what’s really going on. Imagine a simple display showing key data about our application of choice that looks like this: Application Performance Snapshot gives us a quick view into our application’s use of available hardware (CPU, Memory, and Floating Point Utilization) on Linux or Windows. Try it, and if you like it, you should let Intel know. That’s because Intel includes this disclaimer on its site: “This is a Preview Feature.” A preview feature may or may not appear in a future production release. It’s available for you to use in the hopes that you’ll provide feedback on its usefulness and help determine its future. Also, data collected with a preview feature isn’t guaranteed to be backward compatible with future releases. Send your feedback to Intel-Performance-Snapshot-Feedback@intel.com. In my experience, Intel tends to make previews into products, but sometimes with radical changes based on feedback. So, even if you like it, you might want to vote for “Keep it – but as is!” Here’s how to get started and try it out (free): Quick Start Guide: Application Performance Snapshot Quick Start Download from Intel: Application Performance Snapshot Downloads Related snapshots: MPI Performance Snapshot Storage Performance Snapshot But wait, there’s more! It turns out, Intel VTune Amplifier isn’t the only Intel tool to get the “snapshot” fever. Here are two more snapshot tools – both free and backed by teams that are eager for your feedback. MPI Performance Snapshot MPI Performance Snapshot is a scalable, lightweight performance tool for MPI applications on Linux systems. It collects MPI application statistics, including communication, activity, and load balance, and presents it in an easy-to-read format. We can then use the collected information for analysis of the application’s scalability and performance. Intel Storage Performance Snapshot The Storage Performance Snapshot tool analyzes a Linux or Windows system’s storage, CPU, memory, and network usage, and then displays basic performance enhancement opportunities. Storage Performance Snapshot provides a first look at system performance to help determine if additional analysis is needed. Intel Downloading and using snapshot tools for yourself is a quick and easy way to shine a flashlight into applications and see what’s really going on. Learn more Application Performance Snapshot MPI Performance Snapshot Storage Performance Snapshot Click here to download your free 30-day trial of Intel Parallel Studio XE Software Development