numap: A portable library for low-level memory profiling

The memory subsystem of modern multi-core architectures is becoming more and more complex with the increasing number of cores integrated in a single computer system. This complexity leads to profiling needs to let software developers understand how programs use the memory subsystem. Modern processors come with hardware profiling features to help building tools for these profiling needs. Regarding memory profiling, many processors provide means to monitor memory traffic and to sample read and write memory accesses. Unfortunately, these hardware profiling mechanisms are often very complex to use and are specific to each micro-architecture. In this work, we present numap, a library dedicated to the profiling of the memory sub-system of modern multi-core architectures. numap is portable across many micro-architectures and comes with a clean application programming interface allowing to easily build profiling tools on top of it.