The Vampir tool has been developed at the Center for Applied Mathematics of Research Center Jülich and the Center for High Performance Computing of the Technische Universität Dresden. Vampir is available as a commercial product since 1996 and has been enhanced in the scope of many research and development projects. In the past, it was distributed by the German Pallas GmbH which became later a part of Intel Corporation. The cooperation with Intel ended in 2005. The development is continued by Center for Information Services and High Performance Computing (ZIH) of TU Dresden. Now the Vampir product can be obtained directly from this website.

The tool is well-proven and widely used in the high performance computing community for many years. A growing number of performance monitoring environments like TAU, KOJAK or Vampirtrace can produce tracefiles that are readable by Vampir. Unfortunately, Vampir no longer supports Intel's structured trace file (STF) format because of licensing reasons. Since version 5.0, Vampir supports the new Open Trace Format (OTF), that is developed by ZIH as-well. This trace format is especially designed for massively parallel programs.

During a program run of an application, VampirTrace generates an OTF trace file, which can be analyzed and visualized by the visualisation tool Vampir. The VampirTrace library allows MPI communication events of a parallel program to be recorded. Additionally, certain program-specific events can also be included.

Vampir is very portable due to its X-based graphical user interface and available for many computing platforms.