Validation of hardware events for successful performance pattern identification in High Performance Computing

Abstract: Hardware performance monitoring (HPM) is a crucial ingredient of performance analysis tools. While there are interfaces like LIKWID, PAPI or the kernel interface perf_event which provide HPM access with some additional features, many higher level tools combine event counts with results retrieved from other sources like function call traces to derive (semi-)automatic performance advice. However, although HPM is available for x86 systems since the early 90s, only a small subset of the HPM features is used in practice. Performance patterns provide a more comprehensive approach, enabling the identification of various performance-limiting effects. Patterns address issues like bandwidth saturation, load imbalance, non-local data access in ccNUMA systems, or false sharing of cache lines. This work defines HPM event sets that are best suited to identify a selection of performance patterns on the Intel Haswell processor. We validate the chosen event sets for accuracy in order to arrive at a reliable pattern detection mechanism and point out shortcomings that cannot be easily circumvented due to bugs or limitations in the hardware.