FAME: FAirly MEasuring multithreaded architectures

Abstract

Nowadays, multithreaded architectures are becoming more and more popular. In order to evaluate their behavior, several methodologies and metrics have been proposed. A methodology defines when the measurements of a given workload execution are taken. A metric combines those measurements to obtain a final evaluation result. However, since current evaluation methodologies do not provide representative measurements for these metrics, the analysis and evaluation of novel ideas could be either unfair or misleading. Given the potential impact of multithreaded architectures on current andfuture processor designs, it is crucial to develop an accurate evaluation methodology for them. This paper presents FAME, a new evaluation methodology aimed to fairly measure the performance of rnultithreaded processors. FAME reexecutes all traces in a rnultithreaded workload until all of them are fairly represented in the final measurements taken from the workload. We compare FAME with previously used methodologies for both architectural research simulators and real processors. Our results show that FAME provides more accurate measurements than other methodologies, becoming an ideal evaluation methodology to analyze proposals for multithreaded architectures. © 2007 IEEE.