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Lynx - A Dynamic Instrumentation System for Data-Parallel Applications on
       GPGPU Architectures          

Author: Naila Farooqui ([email protected])

GPU Lynx Website: http://code.google.com/p/gpulynx/

For more detailed documentation, please see: 
    http://code.google.com/p/gpulynx/w/list

For related publication, please see: 
    www.cc.gatech.edu/~naila/lynx.pdf

Overview
--------
As parallel execution platforms continue to proliferate, there is a growing need 
for real-time introspection tools to provide insight into platform behavior for 
performance debugging, correctness checks, and to drive effective resource 
management schemes. To address this need, we present the Lynx dynamic 
instrumentation system. Lynx provides the capability to write instrumentation 
routines that are (1) selective, instrumenting only what is needed, (2) transparent, 
without changes to the applications’ source code, (3) customizable, and (4) efficient.

Lynx was originally implemented as a branch of GPU Ocelot, a framework that provides 
run-time code generation of CUDA programs for heterogeneous architectures. Lynx now 
exists as a stand-alone, PTX editing tool, encapsulating only the necessary Ocelot 
dependencies (namely, Ocelot's PTX Parser, PTX IR and CFG/DFG Analyses components). 

Lynx can be built as a library (liblynx.so), where it can be linked with any runtime,
or as a Lynx runtime (liblynx_runtime.so), where it provides a default implementation 
of the CUDA runtime to directly support the execution of CUDA applications on NVIDIA
GPU devices.
 
 * GPU Ocelot: http://code.google.com/p/gpuocelot/

Building Lynx
-------------

Lynx depends on CUDA 4.0+, boost, flex, bison, scons and python (for building). 
So far, Lynx has only been developed and tested on Ubuntu 11.10. You can install 
the necessary packages on Ubuntu:

sudo apt-get install libboost-all-dev
sudo apt-get install flex bison scons python

Please be sure to install the CUDA toolkit (4.0 or higher) from NVIDIA's website.
Lynx currently supports PTX ISA 3.0 and requires a CUDA-capable (Fermi) GPU.

To build Lynx, use the following command:

scons -j<number-of-jobs>

To install Lynx (install dir: /usr/local/lib):

sudo scons install -j<number-of-jobs>

The build script will obtain all of the relevant Ocelot/Hydrazine dependencies 
before building Lynx.

Running CUDA apps with Lynx
---------------------------

Please note that to run Lynx with the currently available instrumentations, 
the 'configure.lynx' file and the "resources" directory need to be located in
the execution directory (i.e., the directory from where the CUDA application is
executed from).

Lynx currently provides the following instrumentations:

Activity Factor (activityFactor)
Branch Divergence (branchDivergence)
Clock Cycle Count (clockCycleCount)
Memory Efficiency (memoryEfficiency)

A sample 'configure.lynx' file is included. The associated instrumentation name
to be specified in the 'configure.lynx' file for each of the above instrumentations 
is specified in parantheses.

To run a CUDA application (for example, BlackScholes) with Lynx:

    LD_PRELOAD="$(PATH_TO_LYNX)/liblynx.so" ./BlackScholes

The default location for liblynx.so and liblynx_runtime.so is 
<lynx-dir>/.release_build/