CICO: A Practical Shared-Memory Programming Performance Model
James R. Larus, Satish Chandra, David Alvra Wood · 1994
A programming performance model provides a programmer with feedback on the cost of program operations and is a necessary basis to write efficient programs. Many sharedmemory performance models do not accurately capture the cost of interprocessor communication caused by non-local memory references, particularly in computers with caches. This paper describes a simple and practical programming performance model--called check-in, check-out (CICO)--for cache-coherent, shared-memory parallel computers. cica consists of two components. The first is a collection of annotations that a programmer adds to a program to elucidate the communication arising from shared-memory references. The second is a model that calculates the communication cost of these annotations. An annotation's cost models the cost of the memory references that it summarizes and serves as a metric to compare alternative implementations. Several examples demonstrate that cica accurately predicts cache misses and identifies changes that improve program performance.