SC22 Proceedings

The International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage, and Analysis

Workshops Archive

Conquering Noise with Hardware Counters on HPC Systems


Workshop: 4th Workshop on Programming and Performance Visualization Tools

Authors: Marcus Ritter, Ahmad Tarraf, and Alexander Geiß (Technical University Darmstadt); Nour Daoud and Bernd Mohr (Forschungszentrum Jülich); and Felix Wolf (Technical University Darmstadt)


Abstract: With increasing system performance and complexity, it is becoming increasingly crucial to examine the scaling behavior of an application and thus determine performance bottlenecks at early stages. Unfortunately, modeling this trend is a challenging task in the presence of noise, as the measurements can become irreproducible and misleading thus resulting in strong deviations from the real behavior. While noise impacts the application runtime, it has little to no effect on some hardware counters like floating-point operations. However, selecting the appropriate counters for performance modeling demands some investigation. We perform a noise analysis on various hardware counters. Using our noise generator, we add on top of the system noise additional noise to inspect the counters' variability. We perform the analysis on five systems with three applications in the presence of various noise patterns and categorize the counters across the systems according to their noise resilience.





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