Abstract
The increasing complexity of computer architectures has made the approach of automatically generating code that is optimized for the target machine a growing area of interest. Examples of such systems are library generators, such as ATLAS, SPIRAL, and FFTW. To generate optimized code without manual intervention, these systems need to know the values of certain hardware parameters, such as the cache size or the number of registers. Current software such as X-Ray or LMbench can automatically determine some of these parameters for single processor super-scalar machines but cannot determine multi-core specific characteristics.
In this paper, we present P-Ray, a software suite that characterizes hardware characteristics of multi-core architectures. Such characteristics include the number of cores that share the L2 cache, the different processors’ interconnection topologies, and the bandwidth-to-memory. Our experiments show that, for several different architectures tested (desktop and server), P-Ray generates accurate results.
This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Awards CCF 0702260 and CNS 0509432 and by DARPA under award W911NF0710416.
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Duchateau, A.X., Sidelnik, A., Garzarán, M.J., Padua, D. (2008). P-Ray: A Software Suite for Multi-core Architecture Characterization. In: Amaral, J.N. (eds) Languages and Compilers for Parallel Computing. LCPC 2008. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 5335. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-89740-8_13
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-89740-8_13
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
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