The Study Of Performance Testing Technique Based On Hardware Performance Monitoring

In recent years, many high performance computers are developed and used widely in many fields. The peak performance of computers continuously increases in a rapidly way. But the sustained performance achieved by real applications does not increase in the same scale as the machine's peak performance does. The gap between real application's performance and the machine's peak performance is widening. Program performance optimization is one of the effective ways to solve this problem.For optimizing the program performances, the major causes that influence the program performances must be located. Then the application code and the data structure are improved accordingly. Performance measurement, which is the basis to catch the program behaviors, It is of importance for the recognition of performance bottleneck and discovering the utilization conditions of processor resource. Furthermore, performance measurement is also needed by program performance prediction.Aiming at the ultimate goal of reducing the testing overhead and providing credible, nicety, luxuriant performance data, we perform research on performance testing technique based on hardware performance monitoring.Hardware Performance monitoring is included in many of today's high-performance processors. The performance data are collected through observing and stat. the events correlated with the performance closely that happened in computer (especially in processors) by Hardware Performance Monitoring Counters installed in processors, when the program is running. These data are used to guide the analysis of the efficacy of architecture components and the optimization of program's performance.In this paper, based on analysis of actuality of performance testing technique and basic theory of hardware performance monitoring, we present a survey of some kinds of hardware performance monitor techniques that are adopted by processors. The ability of hardware monitoring of Pentium4 is emphasized. The issues of hardware monitoring of processors are analyzed, and the ability of hardware performance monitoring of all kinds of processors are analyzed and compared.In this paper, based on studying control mechanism of the Hardware Performance Monitoring Counters installed in Intel's P6 series processors, Intel's Pentium4 processors and AMD'Athlon64 processors, we also investigate the performance measurement tools based on hardware performance monitoring counters. To overcome the deficiency of current tools, we design and implement substrate interface running on Intel Pentium4 processor and Microsoft Windows 2000 operating systems, which is used to collect the performance data of the Hardware Performance Monitoring Counters when program is running. It is also used to provide substrate interface for the further development of performance testing tools.To overcome the deficiency of all kinds of the present testing methods of cache characteristic parameters, we propose the testing methods of cache characteristic parameters based on performance data of hardware performance monitoring. Firstly, the micro-benchmark program based on performance data of cache missed times of hardware performance monitoring is designed and implemented. Secondly, another micro-benchmark program based on performance data of time of time stamp counters is designed and implemented. At last, the two kinds of micro-benchmark program are used to test on Pentium 3 and Pentium 4 processors. Thetesting results are showed.Finally, we summarize our main works and introduce our research plan in the future.