LIKWID is a performance engineering suite for developers, researchers and system administrators who need detailed insight into processor and memory behaviour.
It combines command-line utilities with a shared library and programming interfaces, covering topology discovery, hardware-counter measurement, thread placement, energy analysis and controlled microbenchmarking. The suite is particularly useful in HPC work, where NUMA layout, cache behaviour, processor affinity and low-level performance events can expose scaling problems and bottlenecks across multi-socket systems.
This is free and open source software.
Key Features
- Prints hardware-thread, cache and NUMA topology with likwid-topology.
- Configures and reads hardware performance counters with likwid-perfctr across supported Intel, AMD, ARM and POWER processors, with GPU monitoring support.
- Provides likwid-bench, a microbenchmarking platform for evaluating CPU architecture and memory performance with configurable work groups.
- Pins pthread and OpenMP applications to selected processors with likwid-pin, helping make benchmark placement reproducible.
- Starts MPI and hybrid MPI/OpenMP workloads through likwid-mpirun, supporting Intel MPI, Open MPI, MPICH and SLURM.
- Reads RAPL energy data and Turbo mode information with likwid-powermeter.
- Controls CPU and uncore frequencies with likwid-setFrequencies and exposes broader system settings through the experimental likwid-sysFeatures tool.
- Displays and manipulates selected x86 CPU features, including hardware prefetchers, with likwid-features.
- Provides likwid-perfscope for plotting live performance metrics from likwid-perfctr timeline mode using gnuplot.
- Includes likwid-memsweeper for sweeping NUMA-domain memory and evicting cache lines from the last-level cache.
- Offers APIs for integrating topology, affinity, performance monitoring and marker-based region measurements into applications.
Website: github.com/RRZE-HPC/likwid
Support:
Developer: RRZE-HPC
License: GNU General Public License v3.0
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