Performance Measurements of Parallel and Distributed Systems Using On-Chip Counters

Present generation of high performance computing (HPC) systems are often built around commodity processors due to their high performance at a low cost. These processors provide a number of new architectural features, including support for performance measurement through on-chip counters. On-chip performance counters can provide reliable measurement of processor-level activities that are too complex to accurately capture through other means of instrumentation. We briefly survey the architectures, programming interfaces, and measurement tools for three processors: MIPS R10000, IBM POWER2, and Intel Pentium Pro. These processors are found in several parallel and distributed HPC systems. We then use on-chip counters on two such HPC systems: Origin2000 and IBM SP-2 as case studies to demonstrate the utility from on-chip counters on these HPC