cptnHook - Summer Student Project Report

Abstract

The present is a report of the work that was conducted during my 8-week summer school internship at CERN. The project was centered on the development of an instrumentation tool for the usage of mathematical functions in a scientific application. More specifically, $\textbf{cptnHook}$ addresses a current issue that arises from the the extensive use of very time-consuming mathematical functions (such as transcendental functions) that results in them accounting for a big portion of their run-time. It is believed that the problem can be addressed with ad-hoc approximations of mathematical functions, for which a clear overview of the usage of the functions in the program is required. $\textbf{cptnHook}$ approaches this problem by providing a measurement of the use of mathematical functions in a program by hooking into the machine code and probing the arguments of the functions, without modifying the application's source code. The outputs of the tool are provided in ROOT format for further on analysis