The goal of this book is to present an overview of the current state-of-the-art in computer architecture performance evaluation. The book covers various aspects that relate to performance evaluation, ranging from performance metrics, to workload selection, to various modeling approaches such as analytical modeling and simulation. And because simulation is by far the most prevalent modeling technique in computer architecture evaluation, the book spends more than half its content on simulation, covering an overview of the various simulation techniques in the computer designer's toolbox, followed by various simulation acceleration techniques such as sampled simulation, statistical simulation, and parallel and hardware-accelerated simulation. The evaluation methods described in this book have a primary focus on performance. Although performance remains to be a key design target, it no longer is the sole design target. Power consumption and reliability have quickly become primary design concerns, and today they probably are as important as performance. Other important design constraints relate to cost, thermal issues, yield, etc. This book focuses on performance evaluation methods only. This does not compromise on the importance and general applicability of the techniques described in this book because power and reliability models are typically integrated into existing performance models. These integrated models pose similar challenges to the ones handled in this book. The book also focuses on presenting fundamental concepts and ideas. The book does not provide much quantitative data. Although quantitative data is crucial to performance evaluation, to understand the fundamentals of performance evaluation methods it is not. Moreover, quantitative data from different sources may be hard to compare, and may even be misleading, because the contexts in which the results were obtained may be very different - a comparison based on these numbe

Performance evaluation is at the foundation of computer architecture research and development. Contemporary microprocessors are so complex that architects cannot design systems based on intuition and simple models only. Adequate performance evaluation methods are absolutely crucial to steer the research and development process in the right direction. However, rigorous performance evaluation is non-trivial as there are multiple aspects to performance evaluation, such as picking workloads, selecting an appropriate modeling or simulation approach, running the model and interpreting the results using meaningful metrics. Each of these aspects is equally important and a performance evaluation method that lacks rigor in any of these crucial aspects may lead to inaccurate performance data and may drive research and development in a wrong direction. The goal of this book is to present an overview of the current state-of-the-art in computer architecture performance evaluation, with a special emphasis on methods for exploring processor architectures. The book focuses on fundamental concepts and ideas for obtaining accurate performance data. The book covers various topics in performance evaluation, ranging from performance metrics, to workload selection, to various modeling approaches including mechanistic and empirical modeling. And because simulation is by far the most prevalent modeling technique, more than half the book's content is devoted to simulation. The book provides an overview of the simulation techniques in the computer designer's toolbox, followed by various simulation acceleration techniques including sampled simulation, statistical simulation, parallel simulation and hardware-accelerated simulation. Table of Contents: Introduction / Performance Metrics / Workload Design / Analytical Performance Modeling / Simulation / Sampled Simulation / Statistical Simulation / Parallel Simulation and Hardware Acceleration / Concluding Remarks

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 10th International Conference on Modelling Techniques and Tools for Computer Performance Evaluation, Tools'98, held in Palma de Mallorca, Spain, in September 1998. The 25 revised full papers presented were selected from a total of 69 submissions. Also included are one invited paper and nine tool descriptions. The book is divided into topical sections on software performance tools, network performance, measurement and modelling tools, algorithmic techniques, case studies, Petri net techniques, MVA techniques, and software performance evaluation methods.

Performance evaluation is not just determining whether or not a system meets certain objectives; it is also understanding if and how system performance can be improved. A computer system analyst must master a number of techniques to ascertain important factors and their effect on system performance. The purpose of this book is to develop a better understanding of the problem of performance evaluation and to analyze available techniques within this concept. Directed to present and future computer analysts and designers, readers should be familiar with concepts of hardware organization, system architecture, and operating systems.

Computer and microprocessor architectures are advancing at an astounding pace. However, increasing demands on performance coupled with a wide variety of specialized operating environments act to slow this pace by complicating the performance evaluation process. Carefully balancing efficiency and accuracy is key to avoid slowdowns, and such a balance can be achieved with an in-depth understanding of the available evaluation methodologies. Performance Evaluation and Benchmarking outlines a variety of evaluation methods and benchmark suites, considering their strengths, weaknesses, and when each is appropriate to use. Following a general overview of important performance analysis techniques, the book surveys contemporary benchmark suites for specific areas, such as Java, embedded systems, CPUs, and Web servers. Subsequent chapters explain how to choose appropriate averages for reporting metrics and provide a detailed treatment of statistical methods, including a summary of statistics, how to apply statistical sampling for simulation, how to apply SimPoint, and a comprehensive overview of statistical simulation. The discussion then turns to benchmark subsetting methodologies and the fundamentals of analytical modeling, including queuing models and Petri nets. Three chapters devoted to hardware performance counters conclude the book. Supplying abundant illustrations, examples, and case studies, Performance Evaluation and Benchmarking offers a firm foundation in evaluation methods along with up-to-date techniques that are necessary to develop next-generation architectures.

The need to evaluate computer and communication systems performance and dependability is continuously growing as a consequence of both the increasing complexity of systems and the user requirements in terms of timing behaviour. The 10th International Conference on Modelling Techniques and Tools for C- puter Performance Evaluation, held in Palma in September 1998, was organised with the aim of creating a forum in which both theoreticians and practitioners could interchange recent techniques, tools, and experiences in these areas. This meeting follows the predecessor conferences of this series: 1984 Paris 1988 Palma 1994 Wien 1985 Sophia Antipolis 1991 Torino 1995 Heidelberg 1987 Paris 1992 Edinburgh 1997 Saint Malo The tradition of this conference series continued this year where many high quality papers were submitted. The Programme Committee had a di cult task in selecting the best papers. Many ne papers could not be included in the program due to space constraints. All accepted papers are included in this volume. Also, a set of submissions describing performance modelling tools was transformed into tool presentations and demonstrations. A brief description of these tools is included in this volume. The following table gives the overall statistics for the submissions.