Timed Petri Nets in Performance Exploration of Simultaneous Multithreading
M. Wlodek · InTech eBooks · 2012
In modern computer systems, the performance of the whole system is increasingly often limited by the performance of its memory subsystem [1]. Due to continuous progress in manufacturing technologies, the performance of processors has been doubling every 18 months (the so–called Moore’s law [2]), but the performance of memory chips has been improving only by 10% per year [1], creating a “performance gap” in matching processor’s performance with the required memory bandwidth [3]. More detailed studies have shown that the number of processor cycles required to access main memory doubles approximately every six years [4]. In effect, it is becoming more and more often the case that the performance of applications depends on the performance of the system’s memory hierarchy and it is not unusual that as much as 60% of time processors spend waiting for the completion of memory operations [4].