Application Suitability Assessment for Many-Core Targets

Many-core hardware platforms offer a tremendous opportunity for scaling up performance, but not all codes that run on these platforms have been modernized sufficiently to fully utilize the hardware. Assessing whether a code will effectively utilize a given platform can be challenging, particularly for new or potential future platforms where native execution on real hardware is not possible. In this case, one typically relies on architecture simulators and other workload characterization tools, which are often not user-friendly for developers who want to do a quick initial assessment of an application's suitability for a many-core architecture. To help address this challenge, we present QMSprof, a tool and a set of analyses for an initial assessment of the suitability of a set of applications for a simulated extremely-parallel many-core target. QMSprof automates the process of running a suite of workload binaries through Intel (R) Software Development Emulator (SDE) and the Sniper multi-core simulator and extracting high-level summary statistics. The tool generates comparative plots summarizing key metrics across the workload suite, including the mix of vector and nonvector instructions, scalability with increasing thread count, memory bandwidth utilization, and statistics on cache misses and working set size. These summary metrics are designed to aid performance tuners in selecting promising codes for a many-core target and in pinpointing opportunities for additional tuning. To illustrate the utility of our tool, we also describe some sample results from characterizing applications on a hypothetical many-core architecture.