Benchmarking Next Generation Hardware Platforms: An Experimental Approach
Vishakha Gupta, Adit Ranadive, Ada Gavrilovska, Karsten Schwan · 2012
Abstract — Heterogeneous multi-cores–platforms comprised of both general purpose and accelerator cores—are becoming increasingly common. Further, with processor designs in which there are many cores on a chip, a recent trend is to include functional and performance asymmetries to balance their power usage vs. performance requirements. Coupled with this trend in CPUs is the development of high end interconnects providing low latency and high throughput communication. Understanding the utility of such next generation platforms for future datacenter workloads requires investigations that evaluate the combined effects on workload of (1) processing units, (2) interconnect, and (3) usage models. For benchmarks, then, this requires functionality that makes it possible to easily yet separately vary different benchmark attributes that affect the performance observed for application-relevant metrics like throughput, end-toend