Workshops Archive

Fantastic Hardware Counters and How to Find Them: Automating the Detection of Noise-Resilient Performance Counters in HPC

Workshop: 7th Workshop on Programming and Performance Visualization Tools (ProTools)

Authors: Ahmad Tarraf, Alexander Geiß, Lukas Fuchs, and Felix Wolf (Technical University of Darmstadt)

Abstract: Performance models allow examining the scaling behavior of an application and identifying performance bottlenecks at an early stage. However, application runtime measurements are often tainted by noise on HPC systems. To tackle this problem, hardware counters can be exploited. Yet, not all counters are equally suitable for performance modeling. Some are noise-sensitive, vary strongly during repeated runs, or are faulty on some systems. Thus, appropriate counters must be identified on the inspected systems, requiring extensive testing and complex setups. This paper presents an automated approach that identifies noise-resilient hardware counters on HPC systems. Our approach automatically builds the setup, runs experiments, analyzes and ranks counters based on noise resilience, and presents results via a graphical or console interface. We demonstrate our approach on two HPC clusters and show how the developed tool, alongside the proposed metrics, enables detecting noise-resilient hardware counters in HPC.

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