The SPLASH-2 suite of parallel applications has recently been released to facilitate the study of centralized and distributed shared-address-space multiprocessors. In this context, this paper has two goals. One is to quantitatively characterize the SPLASH-2 programs in terms of fundamental properties and architectural interactions that are important to understand them well. The properties we study include the computational load balance, communication to computation ratio and traffic needs, important working set sizes, and issues related to spatial locality, as well as how these properties scale with problem size and the number of processors. The other, related goal is methodological: to assist people who will use the programs in architectural evaluations to prune the space of application and machine parameters in an informed and meaningful way. For example, by characterizing the working sets of the applications, we describe which operating points in terms of cache size and problem size are representative of realistic situations, which are not, and which re redundant. Using SPLASH-2 as an example, we hope to convey the importance of understanding the interplay of problem size, number of processors, and working sets in designing experiments and interpreting their results.

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The SPLASH-2 programs: characterization and methodological considerations

We present the internals of QEMU, a fast machine emulator using an original portable dynamic translator. It emulates several CPUs (x86, PowerPC, ARM and Sparc) on several hosts (x86, PowerPC, ARM, Sparc, Alpha and MIPS). QEMU supports full system emulation in which a complete and unmodified operating system is run in a virtual machine and Linux user mode emulation where a Linux process compiled for one target CPU can be run on another CPU.

/pdf/qemu-a-fast-and-portable-dynamic-translator-xpb07ophlg.pdf

QEMU, a fast and portable dynamic translator

The determination of upper bounds on execution times, commonly called worst-case execution times (WCETs), is a necessary step in the development and validation process for hard real-time systems. This problem is hard if the underlying processor architecture has components, such as caches, pipelines, branch prediction, and other speculative components. This article describes different approaches to this problem and surveys several commercially available tools1 and research prototypes.

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The worst-case execution-time problem—overview of methods and survey of tools

http://www.inf.ufes.br/~luciac/comcie/JFNK-Knoll.pdf

Jacobian-free Newton-Krylov methods: a survey of approaches and applications

The most exciting development in parallel computer architecture is the convergence of traditionally disparate approaches on a common machine structure. This book explains the forces behind this convergence of shared-memory, message-passing, data parallel, and data-driven computing architectures. It then examines the design issues that are critical to all parallel architecture across the full range of modern design, covering data access, communication performance, coordination of cooperative work, and correct implementation of useful semantics. It not only describes the hardware and software techniques for addressing each of these issues but also explores how these techniques interact in the same system. Examining architecture from an application-driven perspective, it provides comprehensive discussions of parallel programming for high performance and of workload-driven evaluation, based on understanding hardware-software interactions.


* synthesizes a decade of research and development for practicing engineers, graduate students, and researchers in parallel computer architecture, system software, and applications development

* presents in-depth application case studies from computer graphics, computational science and engineering, and data mining to demonstrate sound quantitative evaluation of design trade-offs 

* describes the process of programming for performance, including both the architecture-independent and architecture-dependent aspects, with examples and case-studies

* illustrates bus-based and network-based parallel systems with case studies of more than a dozen important commercial designs

Table of Contents

1 Introduction 
2 Parallel Programs 
3 Programming for Performance 
4 Workload-Driven Evaluation 
5 Shared Memory Multiprocessors 
6 Snoop-based Multiprocessor Design 
7 Scalable Multiprocessors
8 Directory-based Cache Coherence
9 Hardware-Software Tradeoffs 
10 Interconnection Network Design 
11 Latency Tolerance 
12 Future Directions 
APPENDIX A Parallel Benchmark Suites

Parallel Computer Architecture: A Hardware/Software Approach

In both hardware-only and software-only directory protocols the performance is often limited by memory access stall times. To increase the performance, several latency tolerating and reducing techniques have been proposed and shown effective for hardware-only directory protocols. For software-only directory protocols, the efficiency of a technique depends not only on how effective it is as seen by the local processor but also on how it impacts the software handler execution overhead in the node where a memory block is allocated. Based on architectural simulations and case studies of three techniques, we find that prefetching can degrade the performance of software-only directory protocols due to useless prefetches. A relaxed memory consistency model hides all write latency for software-only directory protocols, but the software handler overhead is virtually unaffected and now constitutes a larger portion of the execution time. Overall, latency tolerating techniques for software-only directory protocols must be chosen with more care than for hardware-only directory protocols.

/pdf/relative-performance-of-hardware-and-software-only-directory-posekg5kzt.pdf

Relative performance of hardware and software-only directory protocols under latency tolerating and reducing techniques

Cache misses due to coherence and directory maintenance is a major reason for poor performance in shared memory multiprocessors. We show that the relationship between a particular access pattern an ...

Modelling accesses to stationary data in a shared memory multiprocessor

Applications for Shared Memory Multiprocessors

We have introduced SimWattch, a complete system simulation environment that can be used to conduct performance and power-oriented microarchitecture explorations or revisit existing techniques from a more complete perspective taking into account operating system interactions. As a combination and extension of Simics and Wattch, SimWattch facilitates the analysis of a wider design space for computer architects and application, compiler and OS developers. In addition, it explores a new approach to cost-effective simulation tool design.

Per Stenström

Papers

Relative performance of hardware and software-only directory protocols under latency tolerating and reducing techniques

Modelling accesses to stationary data in a shared memory multiprocessor

Applications for Shared Memory Multiprocessors

SimWattch and learn

Introduction to the special issue on high-performance and embedded architectures and compilers