A Balanced Approach to Application Performance Tuning

Abstract. Current hardware trends place increasing pressure on programmers and tools to optimize scientific code. Numerous tools and techniques exist, but no single tool is a panacea; instead, different tools have different strengths. Therefore, an assortment of performance tuning utilities and strategies are necessary to best utilize scarce resources (e.g., bandwidth, functional units, cache). This paper describes a combined methodology for the optimization process. The strategy combines static assembly analysis using MAQAO with dynamic information from hardware performance monitoring (HPM) and memory traces. We introduce a new technique, decremental analysis (DECAN), to iteratively identify the individual instructions responsible for performance bottlenecks. We present case studies on applications from several independent software vendors (ISVs) on a SMP Xeon Core 2 platform. These strategies help discover problems related to memory access locality and loop unrolling that lead to ...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2009
• Where: LCPC
• Authors: Souad Koliai, Stéphane Zuckerman, Emmanuel Oseret, Mickaël Ivascot, Tipp Moseley, Dinh Quang, William Jalby
• Keywords: Current Hardware Trends, LCPC 2009, Performance Tuning Utilities, Sequential Performance Improvement, System Software