  As supercomputers continue to grow in scale and capabilities, it is becoming
increasingly difficult to isolate processor and system level causes of
performance degradation. Over the last several years, a significant number of
performance analysis and monitoring tools have been built/proposed. However,
these tools suffer from several important shortcomings, particularly in
distributed environments. In this paper we present ScALPEL, a Scalable Adaptive
Lightweight Performance Evaluation Library for application performance
monitoring at the functional level. Our approach provides several distinct
advantages. First, ScALPEL is portable across a wide variety of architectures,
and its ability to selectively monitor functions presents low run-time
overhead, enabling its use for large-scale production applications. Second, it
is run-time configurable, enabling both dynamic selection of functions to
profile as well as events of interest on a per function basis. Third, our
approach is transparent in that it requires no source code modifications.
Finally, ScALPEL is implemented as a pluggable unit by reusing existing
performance monitoring frameworks such as Perfmon and PAPI and extending them
to support both sequential and MPI applications.
