Moving Atom to Windows NT for Alpha

For the last several years, the ATOM technology has provided a flexible tool for instrumenting and analyzing programs on DIGITAL Unix platforms. It has been used to design useful performance and debugging tools, such as basic block counters, cache simulators, and hierarchical profilers, that have been applied to a wide variety of applications. In this paper we present NT-Atom, a new implementation of the Atom technology for Alpha-based Windows NT systems. NT-Atom, which is built on top of the image modification capabilities of SPIKE, is a complete tool development framework for performance tuning and debugging. We discuss the challenges in migrating Atom to Windows NT and maintaining its compatibility with the Unix version of Atom. We also describe how the NT-ATOM graphical user interface supports several new features that facilitate ease-of-use and aid in the development, maintenance, and deployment of custom analysis tools.