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likwid-bench: An Extensible Microbenchmarking Platform for x86 Multicore Compute Nodes

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Abstract

Microbenchmarking is an essential tool for characterizing modern compute nodes. Apart from determining raw performance capabilities microbenchmarking can be used to aquire input parameters for performance models or mimic the behavior of more complex applications. Many existing microbenchmarks are not extensible and implemented in C or Fortran. One problem with microbenchmarks in a high level language is that many performance issues are only apparent on the instruction level. The code quality of the compiler is an additional source of variation. likwid-bench is a framework enabling rapid prototyping of loop-based, threaded assembly kernels. It eases the process of implementing assembly kernels by providing a portable assembly language independent from any concrete assembler program. likwid-bench already includes many standard microbenchmarking testcases and can be used out of the box as a microbenchmarking tool.

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Acknowledgements

We are indebted to Intel Germany for providing test systems and early access hardware for benchmarking. This work was supported by the Competence Network for Scientific and Technical High Performance Computing in Bavaria (KONWIHR) under the project “OMI4papps.”

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Correspondence to Jan Treibig .

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Treibig, J., Hager, G., Wellein, G. (2012). likwid-bench: An Extensible Microbenchmarking Platform for x86 Multicore Compute Nodes. In: Brunst, H., Müller, M., Nagel, W., Resch, M. (eds) Tools for High Performance Computing 2011. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-31476-6_3

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-31476-6_3

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