Application Concurrency Audit Tool: CFinder

CFinder is Intel's free concurrency finder audit tool for software developers. You can use the tool to check if an application is threaded and if the threads are running concurrently. The tool is aiming at providing developers a quick way to test their applications for parallelism. It can also be used to measure the performance by running the application before and after enhancement and compare the measured results. There are two ways to run tool; you can use it in the graphic user interface (GUI) mode or you can run it in the command-line/un-attending (script) mode.

Key Features of CFinder  

• Detect the number of processors (physicals, cores and logical)
• Detect how many threads are running in parallel and their durations
• Compute the percentage parallelism of an application
  

Benefits of Using CFinder

• Do not have to instrument the application
• Use with the binary file with or without debug symbols enabled
• CFinder runs in real-time with the application
• Check to see if an application scales
• No installation need, small footprint and easy to use
• CFinder is FREE

CFinder provides a quick high level view of the application and does not advise developers on how to optimize their threading model. The lower threshold for the sampling rate is 100ms and CFinder does not indicate hot spots in the application analysis.

Once you have a sense of the level of concurrency in your application you can use Intel® Threading Analysis Tools to thread your application correctly.  

• Intel® Thread Checker is an analysis tool that pinpoints hard-to-find threading errors like data races and deadlocks in 32-bit and 64-bit applications. It can also be integrated into an automated Quality Assurance/test process to ensure code quality. 
• Intel® Thread Profiler™ to tune multi-threaded applications faster, for optimal performance on Intel® multi-core processors.  

Technical Requirements

Currently the tool has been tested on 32-bit x86 based Microsoft Windows* XP systems.

Screen Shots

Sample screen shot of CFinder running in Graphical User Mode.

Frequently Asked Questions

How do I get support?
We have set up a discussion forum for users to post questions and receive answers from the development team and other CFinder users.

Where do I go to download it?
Visit the CFinder Download Page

Where are the other questions?
The tool was released on October 22, 2007 and we are just now gathering feedback. Please view the forum for current questions and check back here for the roll up of frequently asked questions.