Performance and power analysis of computer systems

Abstract

This tutorial will present an overview of techniques for architectural-level performance and power analysis of computer systems. It starts with a discussion of metrics for both performance and power, followed by an overview of some widely used benchmarks including SPEC, Mediabench, and MiBench. It then illustrates the use of these benchmarks with some published performance results. After this initial overview, the tutorial will focus on a discussion of architectural simulators to measure performance and power.Architectural simulators model systems on a (clock) cycle-by-cycle basis. Their operation will be illustrated with two popular examples: SimpleScalar and M5. Besides performance analysis, these simulators can be extended to include power estimation. Full simulations of complete applications can be extremely time consuming. The tutorial will explain how sampling techniques can be used to reduce simulation time. Finally, it will conclude with a discussion on the accuracy that can be expected from architectural simulators.