Using highly skewed clocks for application based tracing and application based normalization of processor clocks in an SMP environment

A computer-program product for establishing a library in a data processing environment having a plurality of processors, wherein each processor in the plurality of processors has a clock, the computer program product comprising:

• a computer readable recordable-type media containing computer executable instructions stored thereon, the computer executable instructions comprising:
• computer executable instructions responsive for each clock in the plurality of processors in the data processing environment, for setting a skew between each clock to a value sufficiently large that a particular processor may be identified by measuring a first time on the corresponding processor clock and comparing the first time to at least a second time measured by at least one other clock in the data processing environment;
• computer executable instructions for recording a time stamp, for each processor, in a separate buffer of the data processing environment, wherein the time stamp comprises a processor identifier portion containing a unique value of the each processor and a time representation portion containing a time value;
• and
• computer executable instructions for providing the time stamp of each processor to the library for storage, whereby the library contains information regarding the time stamp of one processor relative to the time stamp of other processors in the plurality of processors in the data processing environment.