Abstract
Accurate on-the-fly characterization of application behaviour requires assessing a set of execution-related parameters at runtime, including performance, power and energy consumption. These parameters can be obtained by relying on hardware measurement facilities built-in modern multi-core architectures, such as performance and energy counters. However, current operating systems (OSs) do not provide the means to directly obtain these characterization data. Thus, the user needs to rely on complex custom-built libraries with limited capabilities, which might introduce significant execution and measurement overheads. In this work, we propose two different techniques for efficient performance, power and energy monitoring for systems with modern multi-core CPUs. Here we propose two monitoring tools that allow capturing the run-time behaviour of a wide range of applications at different system levels: (i) at the user-space level, and (ii) at kernel-level, by using the OS scheduler to directly capture this information. Although the importance of the proposed monitoring facilities is patent for many purposes, we focus herein on their employment for application characterization with the recently proposed Cache-aware Roofline model.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
- 1.
A scheduler tick is a periodic interruption to update the execution statistics and to check if is necessary to preempt the running task.
- 2.
The Intel i7-3770 K is an Ivy Bridge based micro-architecture with 4 cores. It operates at 3.5 GHz and its memory organization comprises 3 cache levels of 32 KB, 256 KB and 8192 KB, respectively. The DRAM memory controllers support up to two channels (8 B) of DDR3 operating at \(2\times 933\) MHz.
References
Browne, S., Dongarra, J., Garner, N., Ho, G., Mucci, P.: A portable programming interface for performance evaluation on modern processors. Int. J. High Perform. Comput. Appl. 14(3), 189–204 (2000)
OProfile: About oprofile. http://oprofile.sourceforge.net/about/ (2012)
Ilic, A., Pratas, F., Sousa, L.: Cache-aware roofline model: upgrading the loft. IEEE Comput. Architect. Lett. 99, 1 (2013)
Intel: Intel 64 and ia-32 architectures software developer’s manual: volume 3b, pp. 120–251. http://download.intel.com/products/processor/manual/253669.pdf (2012)
PAPI: Papi: Supported platforms: Currently supported. http://icl.cs.utk.edu/papi/custom/index.html?lid=62&slid=96
Curtis-Maury, M., Nikolopoulos, D., Antonopoulos, C.: Pacman: A performance counters manager for intel hyperthreaded processors. In: 3rd International Conference on Quantitative Evaluation of Systems, 2006. QEST 2006, pp. 141–144 (2006)
Eranian, S.: Perfmon2: a flexible performance monitoring interface for linux, Citeseer (2006)
Intel: Intel performance counter monitor - a better way to measure cpu utilization. http://software.intel.com/en-us/articles/intel-performance-counter-monitor-a-better-way-to-measure-cpu-utilization (2012)
Treibig, J., Hager, G., Wellein, G.: Likwid: a lightweight performance-oriented tool suite for x86 multicore environments. In: 2010 39th International Conference on Parallel Processing Workshops (ICPPW), pp. 207–216. IEEE (2010)
LWN.net: Perfcounters added to the mainline. http://lwn.net/Articles/339361 (2009)
Molnar, I.: Goals, design and implementation of the completely fair scheduler. https://www.kernel.org/doc/Documentation/scheduler/sched-design-CFS.txt
Acknowledgments
This work was partially supported by national funds through Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia (FCT) under projects P2HCS (ref. PTDC/EEI-ELC/3152/2012), Threads (ref. PTDC/EEA-ELC/117329/2010), and project PEst-OE/EEI/LA0021/2013.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2014 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this paper
Cite this paper
Antão, D., Taniça, L., Ilic , A., Pratas, F., Tomás , P., Sousa, L. (2014). Monitoring Performance and Power for Application Characterization with the Cache-Aware Roofline Model. In: Wyrzykowski, R., Dongarra, J., Karczewski, K., Waśniewski, J. (eds) Parallel Processing and Applied Mathematics. PPAM 2013. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 8384. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-55224-3_70
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-55224-3_70
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-642-55223-6
Online ISBN: 978-3-642-55224-3
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)