Performance monitoring on a shared-memory multiprocessor

Described are performance monitoring tools that take advantage of multiprocessor architectures. The monitors run concurrently with the target program and nonintrusively examine its behavior. In addition, the availability of multiple processors allows a programmer to interactively instrument the target while it is running. This capability of interactively and massively instrumenting an executing program and doing so with minimal intrusiveness is not available on uniprocessor architectures. Furthermore, with multiple processors results in a graphical form can be presented concurrently with program execution. The implementation and use of such a monitor is also described