A Call-Graph Profiler for GNU Octave

TL;DR

This paper introduces a call-graph profiler for GNU Octave, enhancing performance analysis capabilities for numerical computing by providing detailed call structure insights beyond simple timing methods.

Contribution

It presents the design and implementation of a call-graph profiler tailored for GNU Octave, improving upon existing flat profiling methods.

Findings

Profiler outperforms rudimentary timer measurements

Provides clean interfaces for integration with other tools

Demonstrates effective profiling on numerical programs

Abstract

We report the design and implementation of a call-graph profiler for GNU Octave, a numerical computing platform. GNU Octave simplifies matrix computation for use in modeling or simulation. Our work provides a call-graph profiler, which is an improvement on the flat profiler. We elaborate design constraints of building a profiler for numerical computation, and benchmark the profiler by comparing it to the rudimentary timer start-stop (tic-toc) measurements, for a similar set of programs. The profiler code provides clean interfaces to internals of GNU Octave, for other (newer) profiling tools on GNU Octave.