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ISPASS
2009
IEEE

Accuracy of performance counter measurements

13 years 10 months ago
Accuracy of performance counter measurements
Many workload characterization studies depend on accurate measurements of the cost of executing a piece of code. Often these measurements are conducted using infrastructures to access hardware performance counters. Most modern processors provide such counters to count micro-architectural events such as retired instructions or clock cycles. These counters can be difficult to configure, may not be programmable or readable from user-level code, and can not discriminate between events caused by different software threads. Various software infrastructures address this problem, providing access to per-thread counters from application code. This paper constitutes the first comparative study of the accuracy of three commonly used measurement infrastructures (perfctr, perfmon2, and PAPI) on three common processors (Pentium D, Core 2 Duo, and AMD ATHLON 64 X2). We find significant differences in accuracy of various usage patterns for the different infrastructures and processors. Based on...
Dmitrijs Zaparanuks, Milan Jovic, Matthias Hauswir
Added 19 May 2010
Updated 19 May 2010
Type Conference
Year 2009
Where ISPASS
Authors Dmitrijs Zaparanuks, Milan Jovic, Matthias Hauswirth
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