Title
Nondeterminism and Overcount in Hardware Counter Implementations
Publication Date
4-1-2013
Document Type
Conference Proceeding
Abstract
Ideal hardware performance counters provide exact deterministic results. Real-world performance monitoring unit (PMU) implementations do not always live up to this ideal. Events that should be exact and deterministic (such as retired instructions) show run-to-run variation and overcount on x86_64 machines, even when run in strictly controlled environments. These effects are non-intuitive to casual users and cause difficulties when strict determinism is desirable, such as when implementing deterministic replay or deterministic threading libraries.
COinS
Comments
V. M. Weaver, D. Terpstra and S. Moore, "Non-determinism and overcount on modern hardware performance counter implementations," 2013 IEEE International Symposium on Performance Analysis of Systems and Software (ISPASS), Austin, TX, USA USA, 2013, pp. 215-224.
doi:10.1109/ISPASS.2013.6557172