An empirical high level performance model for future many-cores

Abstract

Estimating the potential performance of parallel applications on the yet-to-be-designed future many cores is very speculative. The simple models proposed by Amdahl's law (fixed input problem size) or Gustafson's law (fixed number of cores) do not completely capture the scaling behaviour of a multi-threaded (MT) application leading to over estimation of performance in the many-core era. On the other hand, modeling many-core by simulation is too slow to study the applications performance.In this paper, we propose a more refined but still tractable, high level empirical performance model for multi-threaded applications, the Serial/Parallel Scaling (SPS) Model to study the scalability and performance of application in many-core era. SPS model learns the application behavior on a given architecture and provides realistic estimates of the performance in future many-cores. Considering both input problem size and the number of cores in modeling, SPS model can help in making high level decisions on the design choice of future many-core applications and architecture. We validate the model on the Many-Integrated Cores (MIC) xeon-phi with 240 logical cores.