Section: Research Program

Performance evaluation/guarantee

Predicting/evaluating the performance of an application on a system without explicitly executing the application on the system is required for several usages. Two of these usages are central to the research of the ALF project-team: microarchitecture research (the system to be be evaluated does not exist) and Worst Case Execution Time estimation for real-time systems (the numbers of initial states or possible data inputs is too large).

When proposing a micro-architecture mechanism, its impact on the overall processor architecture has to be evaluated in order to assess its potential performance advantages. For microarchitecture research, this evaluation is generally done through the use of cycle-accurate simulation. Developing such simulators is quite complex and microarchitecture research was helped but also biased by some popular public domain research simulators (e.g. Simplescalar [52] ). Such simulations are CPU consuming and simulations cannot be run on a complete application.

Real-time systems need a different use of performance prediction; on hard real-time systems, timing constraints must be respected independently from the data inputs and from the initial execution conditions. For such a usage, the Worst Case Execution Time (WCET) of an application must be evaluated and then checked against the timing constraints. While safe and tight WCET estimation techniques and tools exist for reasonably simple embedded processors (e.g. techniques based on abstract interpretation such as [55] ), accurate evaluation of the WCET of an algorithm on a complex uniprocessor system is a difficult problem. Accurately modelling data cache behavior [3] and complex superscalar pipelines are still research questions as illustrated by the presence of so-called timing anomalies in dynamically scheduled processors, resulting from complex interactions between processor elements (among others, interactions between caching and instruction scheduling) [59] .

With the advance of multicores, evaluating / guaranteeing a computer system response time is becoming much more difficult. Interactions between processes occurs at different levels. The execution time on each core depends on the behavior of the other cores. Simulations of 1000's cores micro-architecture will be needed in order to evaluate future many-core proposals. While a few multiprocessor simulators are available for the community, these simulators cannot handle realistic 1000's cores micro-architecture. New techniques have to be invented to achieve such simulations. WCET estimations on multicore platforms will also necessitate radically new techniques, in particular, there are predictability issues on a multicore where many resources are shared; those resources include the memory hierarchy, but also the processor execution units and all the hardware resources if SMT is implemented [66] .