The implications of working set analysis on supercomputing memory hierarchy design.

Conference · Tue Mar 01 04:00:00 EST 2005

OSTI ID:946978

Kogge, Peter; Murphy, Richard C; Rodrigues, Arun F; Underwood, Keith Douglas

Supercomputer architects strive to maximize the performance of scientific applications. Unfortunately, the large, unwieldy nature of most scientific applications has lead to the creation of artificial benchmarks, such as SPEC-FP, for architecture research. Given the impact that these benchmarks have on architecture research, this paper seeks an understanding of how they relate to real-world applications within the Department of Energy. Since the memory system has been found to be a particularly key issue for many applications, the focus of the paper is on the relationship between how the SPEC-FP benchmarks and DOE applications use the memory system. The results indicate that while the SPEC-FP suite is a well balanced suite, supercomputing applications typically demand more from the memory system and must perform more 'other work' (in the form of integer computations) along with the floating point operations. The SPEC-FP suite generally demonstrates slightly more temporal locality leading to somewhat lower bandwidth demands. The most striking result is the cumulative difference between the benchmarks and the applications in terms of the requirements to sustain the floating-point operation rate: the DOE applications require significantly more data from main memory (not cache) per FLOP and dramatically more integer instructions per FLOP.

• Research Organization: Sandia National Laboratories
• Sponsoring Organization: USDOE
• DOE Contract Number: AC04-94AL85000
• OSTI ID: 946978
• Report Number(s): SAND2005-1380C
• Country of Publication: United States
• Language: English

Related Subjects

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING
99 GENERAL AND MISCELLANEOUS
BENCHMARKS
COMPUTER ARCHITECTURE
DESIGN
MEMORY MANAGEMENT
PERFORMANCE
SUPERCOMPUTERS