Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) have been widely used to accelerate artificial intelligence, physics simulation, medicalimaging, and information visualization applications. To improve GPU performance, GPU hardware designers need to identifyperformance issues by inspecting a huge amount of simulator-generated traces. Visualizing the execution traces can reduce thecognitive burden of users and facilitate making sense of behaviors of GPU hardware components. In this paper, we first formalizethe process of GPU performance analysis and characterize the design requirements of visualizing execution traces based ona survey study and interviews with GPU hardware designers. We contribute data and task abstraction for GPU performanceanalysis. Based on our task analysis, we propose Daisen, a framework that supports data collection from GPU simulators andprovides visualization of the simulator-generated GPU execution traces. Daisen features a data abstraction and trace formatthat can record simulator-generated GPU execution traces. Daisen also includes a web-based visualization tool that helps GPUhardware designers examine GPU execution traces, identify performance bottlenecks, and verify performance improvement.Our qualitative evaluation with GPU hardware designers demonstrates that the design of Daisen reflects the typical workflowof GPU hardware designers. Using Daisen, participants were able to effectively identify potential performance bottlenecks andopportunities for performance improvement. The open-sourced implementation of Daisen can be found at gitlab.com/akita/vis.Supplemental materials including a demo video, survey questions, evaluation study guide, and post-study evaluation survey areavailable at osf.io/j5ghq