Publications

PerDome: A performance model for heterogeneous computing systems

Tang, Li; Hu, X.S.; Barrett, Richard F.

Heterogeneous systems, consisting of different types of processors, have the potential to offer higher performance at lower energy cost than homogeneous systems. However, it is rather challenging to actually achieve the high execution efficiency promised by such a system due to the larger design space and the lack of reliable performance/energy models for aiding design space exploration. This paper fills this gap by proposing a performance model for heterogeneous systems. In processor level, the roofline model [1] can produce the performance upper bound of executed code using its ratio of computation to memory traffic. Our model, referred to as PerDome, builds on the roofline model and can reliably predict the system performance for both homogeneous execution (where each processor either executes the entire application code or none) and heterogeneous execution (where each processor executes part of the application code). Two case studies are carried out to demonstrate the effectiveness of PerDome. The results show that PerDome can indeed provide a good estimate for performance comparisons which can then be used for heterogeneous system design space exploration.