Engineering Commons^™

Towards A Cross-Platform Microbenchmark Suite For Evaluating Hardware Performance Counter Data, Maria G. Aguilera, Roberto Araiza, Thientam Pham, Patricia J. Teller

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)

As useful as performance counters are, the meaning of reported aggregate event counts is sometimes questionable. Questions arise due to unanticipated processor behavior, overhead associated with the interface, the granularity of the monitored code, hardware errors, and lack of standards with respect to event definitions. To explore these issues, we are conducting a sequence of studies using carefully crafted microbenchmarks that permit the accurate prediction of event counts and investigation of the differences between hardware-reported and predicted event counts. This paper presents the methodology employed, some of the microbenchmarks developed, and some of the information uncovered to date. The information …