Synthesizing contention
Jason Mars, Mary Lou Soffa · 2009
Multicore microarchitecture designs have become ubiquitous in today's computing environment enabling multiple processes to execute simultaneously on a single chip. With these new parallel processing capabilities comes a need to better understand how co-running applications impact and interfere with each other. The ability to characterize and better understand cross-core performance interference can prove critical for a number of application domains, such as performance debugging, compiler optimization, and application co-scheduling to name a few. We proposed a novel methodology for the characterization and profiling of cross-core interference on current multicore systems, which we call contention synthesis. Our profiling approach characterizes an applications cross-core interference sensitivity by manufacturing contention with the application and observing the impact of this synthesized contention on the application.