Performance Analysis with Unified Hardware Counter Metrics

Hardware performance counters provide detailed insight into the performance of applications running on modern systems, but they can be challenging to use without detailed knowledge of the computational and counter architectures. Our work addresses this challenge by identifying metrics that are common to many micro-architectures and can be directly related to the algorithms in question. These metrics, some long used and some being presented for the first time, are carefully designed to be easy to follow, informative, and portable to multiple systems. In this paper, we discuss the background of empirical performance analysis, describe our set of metrics, and demonstrate analysis on example benchmarks and mini-applications. The metrics and examples are presented on both an Intel Xeon Cascade Lake and an ARM-based Fujitsu A64FX. The significant differences in the ISAs, caches and hardware counters between these two systems demonstrate the portability of the proposed metrics. 1