System Performance Evaluation

Modern multicore systems pose many challenges to software developers that want to obtain good performance and/or want to use the resources of a processor as efficiently as possible. Understanding the performance aspects is sometime possible through the performance monitoring units (PMUs) of these systems, but using these units is sometimes far from easy.

A number of projects have explored the use of hardware perfomance counters. One aspect that has not yet been explored extensively is how different input data sets influence the performance "profile" that is captured by the hardware performance counter.

Since many modern performance counters are sampling based, there is probably no analytical approach to answering this question.

Environment: Java, Jikes RVM, Linux, Pentium 4
Keywords: Profiling, performance evaluation, hardware performance counters
Contacts: Prof. Th. Gross, 63 27342, RZ H1.2, thomas.gross at inf.ethz.ch
Supervisors: Prof. Th. Gross, 63 27342, RZ H1.2, thomas.gross at inf.ethz.ch