Insight into application performance using application-dependent characteristics

Abstract

Carefully crafted performance characterization can provide significant insight into application performance and can be beneficial to computer designers, compiler and application developers, and end users. To achieve all the benefits of performance characterization, the characterization must incorporate a comprehensive set of characteristics that affect performance and can be measured with minimal perturbation from the underlying micro-architecture. To this end, we advocate the use of application-dependent characteristics that allow general conclusions to be drawn about the application itself rather than its observed performance on a specific architecture. In our prior work [7], we introduced a set of application-dependent characteristics and showed that they are consistent across architectures. In this work, we present an efficient characterization methodology that incorporates a more comprehensive set of application-dependent characteristics. We also explain in detail how these characteristics can be used to reason about and gain insight into application performance. Finally, we report characterization results on SPEC MPI2007 and Mantevo benchmarks. To our knowledge, this is the first work to present application-dependent characterization results for SPEC MPI2007 and some of the new Mantevo benchmarks.