Performance is a very important factor that drives the development of computing. Code optimization with the help of performance tools is one of the major measure to achieve better performance. However, the existing performance tools diverse widely in their functionality and usage and thus rely on different user interfaces. This results into difficulty in the usage and poor interoperability.

The Performance Cockpit is an Eclipse-based GUI platform that provides a unified user interface for a series of performance tools. Compared to other GUIs for performance tools, the Performance Cockpit excels in its easy learning and usage, its extensibility and interoperatility. The integration of performance tools with the Eclipse environment would also allow programmers of high performance systems to exploit the general advantages of integrated interactive development environment. The key enablement factors are the extensible architecture and standard representations for related information. Unlike the Eclipse Test and Performance Tools Platform that tries to "standardize" the tools to be plugged into the system, the Performance Cockpit focuses on the "integration" of existing tools with no or minor modifications.

The Performance Cockpit provides the basis for a universal integration platform for performance tools. Such a platform is be beneficial to users and developers of all performance tools. It is intended to be programming language neutral, programming paradigm neutral, and performance tool neutral. Towards this aim, further efforts are required, which include the generalization of the currently defined architecture so that it will cover a wider range of performance tools, and the integration with the diverse programming extensions contributed by different parties, for example, the Eclipse Parallel Tools Platform.