A Common Workload Interface for the Performance Prediction of High Performance Systems

There is a wide range of performance models being developed for the analysis of present and future generation systems. A major concern in using these models however, is the provision of realistic application workload information. There is a need for a common interface that couples generic workload information to the underlying hardware characteristics. In this work a three level framework is described which enables the definition of workload information (both computational and mapping), and hardware performance characteristics to be included, in a modular and reusable format. The approach lends itself to performance studies that can be used in cross-platform performance comparisons as well as guiding the design and implementation of code on a single system. This is currently in use for the analysis of High Performance Computing systems but may equally be applicable in other domains where the analysis of resources is a concern. 1 in IEEE Int. Symp. On Computer Architecture, Workshop on Performance Analysis in Design (PAID’98), Barcelona, June 1998.