A novel multi-level integrated roofline model approach for performance characterization

Abstract

With energy-efficient architectures, including accelerators and many-core processors, gaining traction, application developers face the challenge of optimizing their applications for multiple hardware features including many-core parallelism, wide processing vector-units and on-chip high-bandwidth memory. In this paper, we discuss the development and utilization of a new application performance tool based on an extension of the classical roofline-model for simultaneously profiling multiple levels in the cache-memory hierarchy. This tool presents a powerful visual aid for the developer and can be used to frame the many-dimensional optimization problem in a tractable way. We show case studies of real scientific applications that have gained insights from the Integrated Roofline Model.<br />