Performance Variability of SPECCPU 2006 programs in Multi-core systems

This paper is aimed at exploring the various factors that contribute to Performance Variability of applications that run on Multi-core systems. Factors ranging from hardware resource sharing between the cores to Load Balancing by the Operating system are found to contribute to Performance Variability which is a highly undesirable effect. Performance Variability can also lead to system-level effects like slowing down of applications/threads, Thread Starvation as well as Priority Inversion. Appropriate measures must be taken to accurately estimate the cause and extent of variability and methods need to be devised to minimize it. In this paper, exhaustive simulation studies using the SPECCPU 2006 benchmark suite have been conducted for this purpose and various important conclusions have been drawn.