Quantifying Locality In The Memory Access Patterns of HPC Applications

  • Authors:

  • Jonathan Weinberg;Michael O. McCracken;Erich Strohmaier;Allan Snavely

  • Affiliations:

  • University of California, San Diego;University of California, San Diego;Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory;University of California, San Diego

  • Venue:
  • SC '05 Proceedings of the 2005 ACM/IEEE conference on Supercomputing
  • Year:
  • 2005

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Abstract

Several benchmarks for measuring the memory performance of HPC systems along dimensions of spatial and temporal memory locality have recently been proposed. However, little is understood about the relationships of these benchmarks to real applications and to each other. We propose a methodology for producing architecture-neutral characterizations of the spatial and temporal locality exhibited by the memory access patterns of applications. We demonstrate that the results track intuitive notions of locality on several synthetic and application benchmarks. We employ the methodology to analyze the memory performance components of the HPC Challenge Benchmarks, the Apex-MAP benchmark, and their relationships to each other and other benchmarks and applications. We show that this analysis can be used to both increase understanding of the benchmarks and enhance their usefulness by mapping them, along with applications, to a 2-D space along axes of spatial and temporal locality.