Performance monitoring on high-end general processing boards using hardware performance counters
Gabor Andai · KTH Publication Database DiVA (KTH Royal Institute of Technology) · 2015
Most of the advanced microprocessors today incorporate on-chip hardware performance counters. These counters are capable to count various events in a non-invasive way, while executing real workloads. Events such as the number of instructions, memory accesses, cache and TLB misses are the most common ones that can be precisely measured. The primary accomplishment of this work was to implement a performance monitoring tool, which could be used to evaluate system behaviour on high-end processing platforms. The tool is able to collect data from hardware performance counters and present them in an interpretable way. Moreover, it has support for two different platforms and two operating systems. As a secondary objective, several measurements were carried out on both supported platforms and operating systems to demonstrate the tool’s capabilities, and to solve the potential use-cases.