High Level Methodologies for Performance Characterization and Prediction

Designing a supercomputer to satisfy the needs of future applications and workloads within a given power envelope while considering the rapidly evolving high technology environment is not an easy task. In this frame, the prediction of performance can be used for many different needs from designing a new micro architecture or memory hierarchy to defining the interconnection and storage of the future. Several tools already exist for analyzing the different aspects of application characterization and performance prediction. They have, however, so far rarely been connected due to their different precisions and resolutions. Based on a first approximation of the application behavior, mostly involving memory bandwidth (BW) and floating point (FP) demands, we can demonstrate that realistic performance predictions can be easily obtained at the application level for single and multiple node configurations.