A Scalable Analytical Memory Model for CPU Performance Prediction

As the US Department of Energy (DOE) invests in exascale computing, performance modeling of physics codes on CPUs remain a challenge in computational co-design due to the complex design of processors including memory hierarchies, instruction pipelining, and speculative execution. We present Analytical Memory Model (AMM), a model of cache hierarchies, embedded in the Performance Prediction Toolkit (PPT) - a suite of discrete-event-simulation-based co-design hardware and software models. AMM enables PPT to significantly improve the quality of its runtime predictions of scientific codes. AMM uses a computationally efficient, stochastic method to predict the reuse distance profiles, where reuse distance is a hardware architecture-independent measure of the patterns of virtual memory accesses. AMM relies on a stochastic, static basic block-level analysis of reuse profiles measured from the memory traces of applications on small instances. The analytical reuse profile is useful to estimate the effective latency and throughput of memory access, which in turn are used to predict the overall runtime of an application. Our experimental results demonstrate the scalability of AMM, where we report the error-rates of three benchmarks on two different hardware models.