Modeling Performance of Parallel Programs

The actual performance of parallel programs is often disappointing, especially in comparison to the peak performance offered by the underlying hardware. There are many sources of performance degradation and understanding these sources is necessary to improve application performance. In this paper we discuss performance modeling, an approach to understanding the performance of parallel systems. We present a survey of current approaches to modeling (both analytical modeling based on system parameters, and structural modeling based on the structure of the program), and propose a combination of these two approaches as a promising direction for new work. This combination is explored by evaluating and proposing improvements to lost cycles analysis, which already contains features from both approaches, and also combines measurement and modeling.

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