Performance and Power Profiling with Emulated Systems
Date Issued
2012
Date
2012
Author(s)
Tu, Chia-Heng
Abstract
Simulation is a common approach for assisting system design and optimization. For system-wide optimization, energy and computational resources are often the two most critical limitations. Modeling energy-states of each hardware component and time spent in each state is needed for accurate energy and performance prediction. Tracking software execution and hardware utilization in a realistic operating environment with properly modeled input/output is key to accurate prediction. However, the conventional approaches can have difficulties in practice. First, for a complex system, building a cycle-accurate simulation environment is no easy task. This is especially true for a multicore system consisting of different types of processing cores. Secondly, for I/O-intensive applications, a slow simulation would significantly alter the application behavior and change its performance profile. Thirdly, conventional software profiling tools generally do not work on simulators, which makes it difficult for performance analysis of complicated software, e.g., Java applications.
This dissertation presents a virtual performance analysis framework (VPA) to tackle the above problems. The proposed framework eases the effort of building a simulation environment by leveraging the infrastructure of functional emulators and adding performance and power models. Multiple sets of the performance and power models can be selectively used to verify if the speed of the simulated system impacts the software behavior. Furthermore, we develop the methodology to build profiling tools with the functional emulator by adding performance/power monitoring facilities and the software activity analyzer. In addition, we extend the VPA framework to facilitate the construction of an emulation environment for a heterogeneous multicore system via integrating the existing processor emulators. The timing synchronization mechanism and the contention model are also included to give an accurate estimate of system performance. We have prototyped the framework and our case studies of real life applications show that the information provided by our tools are useful for software optimization and system design for complex systems, such as Android smartphones.
Subjects
Full system emulation
cycle-approximate emulator
performance analysis tool
performance modeling
power modeling
multicore system emulation
heterogeneous multicore system
Type
thesis
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