Mode of access: World Wide Web.

System requirements: Adobe Acrobat Reader.

Part of: Synthesis digital library of engineering and computer science.

Series from website.

Includes bibliographical references (p. 109-127).

1. Introduction -- Structure of computer architecture (r)evolution -- Importance of performance evaluation -- Book outline --

2. Performance Metrics -- Single-threaded workloads -- Multi-threaded workloads -- Multiprogram workloads -- System throughput -- Average normalized turnaround time -- Comparison to prevalent metrics -- STP versus ANTT performance evaluation -- Average performance -- Harmonic and arithmetic average: Mathematical viewpoint -- Geometric average: Statistical viewpoint -- Final thought on averages -- Partial metrics --

3. Workload Design -- From workload space to representative workload -- PCA-based workload design -- Plackett and Burman based workload design -- Limitations and discussion --

4. Analytical Performance Modeling -- Empirical versus mechanistic modeling -- Empirical modeling -- Mechanistic modeling: interval modeling -- Hybrid mechanistic-empirical modeling --

5. Simulation -- The computer architect's toolbox -- Functional simulation -- Alternatives -- Operating system effects -- Full-system simulation -- Specialized trace-driven simulation -- Trace-driven simulation -- Execution-driven simulation -- Taxonomy -- Dealing with non-determinism -- Modular simulation infrastructure -- Need for simulation acceleration --

6. Sampled Simulation -- What sampling units to select -- Statistical sampling -- Targeted Sampling -- Comparing design alternatives through sampled simulation -- How to initialize architecture state -- Fast-forwarding -- Checkpointing -- How to initialize microarchitecture state -- Cache state warmup -- Predictor warmup -- Processor core state -- Sampled multiprocessor and multi-threaded processor simulation --

7. Statistical simulation -- Methodology overview -- Applications -- Single-threaded workloads -- Statistical profiling -- Synthetic trace generation -- Synthetic trace simulation -- Multi-program workloads -- Multi-threaded workloads -- Other work in statistical modeling --

8. Parallel Simulation and Hardware Acceleration -- Parallel sampled simulation -- Parallel simulation -- FPGA-accelerated simulation -- Taxonomy -- Example projects --

9. Concluding Remarks -- Topics that this book did not cover (yet) -- Measurement bias -- Design space exploration -- Simulator validation -- Future work in performance evaluation methods -- Challenges related to software -- Challenges related to hardware -- Final comment -- Bibliography -- Author's biography.

Abstract freely available; full-text restricted to subscribers or individual document purchasers.

Compendex

INSPEC

Google scholar

Google book search

Performance evaluation is at the foundation of computer architecture research and development. Contemporary microprocessors are so complex that architects cannot design systems based on intuition and simple models only. Adequate performance evaluation methods are absolutely crucial to steer the research and development process in the right direction. However, rigorous performance evaluation is non-trivial as there are multiple aspects to performance evaluation, such as picking workloads, selecting an appropriate modeling or simulation approach, running the model and interpreting the results using meaningful metrics. Each of these aspects is equally important and a performance evaluation method that lacks rigor in any of these crucial aspects may lead to inaccurate performance data and may drive research and development in a wrong direction. The goal of this book is to present an overview of the current state-of-the-art in computer architecture performance evaluation, with a special emphasis on methods for exploring processor architectures. The book focuses on fundamental concepts and ideas for obtaining accurate performance data. The book covers various topics in performance evaluation, ranging from performance metrics, to workload selection, to various modeling approaches including mechanistic and empirical modeling. And because simulation is by far the most prevalent modeling technique, more than half the book's content is devoted to simulation. The book provides an overview of the simulation techniques in the computer designer's toolbox, followed by various simulation acceleration techniques including sampled simulation, statistical simulation, parallel simulation and hardware-accelerated simulation.

Also available in print.

Title from PDF t.p. (viewed on June 4, 2010).