Performance and energy metrics for multi-threaded applications on DVFS processors

Abstract

Due to their internal execution characteristics, application programs exploit the hardware very differently, which leads to a quite diverse behavior concerning their performance or the energy consumed for their execution. A change of the operational frequency of DVFS processors leads to further variations in performance and energy consumption, as does the exploitation of thread parallelism on multicores. This article combines frequency scaling and thread-parallelism and considers several new metrics for the evaluation of an application's performance and energy consumption. As application programs, the PARSEC benchmark suite and the SPLASH-2 benchmark suite are investigated. The PARSEC benchmark suite provides an up-to-date collection of applications with different workloads on chip-multiprocessors. The SPLASH-2 is a common suite for scientific studies on parallel shared memory machines. Intel Core i7 processors are used as hardware platforms for the evaluation.