SimTrace: Capturing over Time Program Phase Behavior

As computers and the workloads they run have grown in size and complexity, it has become difficult to test the performance and power of future products under design. These products are often designed on simulators that are orders of magnitude slower than the final product. For this reason, industry and academia have developed methodologies to reduce run times. However, in order to study runtime adaptive techniques for performance and power/energy management, it is important to capture the over time phase behavior of workloads. One technique, SimPoint, has been demonstrated to capture average behavior accurately, but it is not known how well a sequence of SimPoints can capture over time program phase behavior. To explore this, we replay the sequence of SimPoints and evaluate the sequence’s accuracy. Using SPEC CPU 2017 benchmarks as a case study, we discover good accuracy for the replayed sequence: with less than 5% performance error (Instructions Per Cycle) for four time-series metrics.