Design, Evaluation, and Implementation of an Accurate Benchmarking Methodology for Multi- Core Processors Based Systems

The emergence of multi-core architectures has lead to the challenge of its efficient utilization. A comprehensive understanding of performance issues for these architectures is required to materialize any performance gains. This research conducts measurement based performance benchmarking and evaluation for multi-core processors based systems. It comprises of four phases: (1) design of an accurate benchmarking methodology for multi-core processors based systems; (2) statistical comparisons and analyses of accuracy of this methodology with existing techniques; (3) development of selected benchmarks using this methodology; and (4) measurement based studies, which are driven by the workload generated through developed benchmarks. This research work extends the state-of-the-art in existing benchmarks by improving their accuracy for benchmarking multi-core processors based systems. Results generated as an outcome of this research effort lends a greater insight into the interaction of multi-core architecture with system and user level software. Such insight is essential to design efficient parallel applications as well as to tune existing applications for multi-core architectures. 1 This research work is funded by National ICT R&D Fund, Ministry of Information and Technology, Pakistan. This work was completed through an internship from Cisco-Pakistan.