More Difficult for Multiprocessors
What is a representative workload?
Software model has not stabilized
Many architectural and application degrees of freedom
- Huge design space: no. of processors, other architectural, application
- Impact of these parameters and their interactions can be huge
- High cost of communication
What are the appropriate metrics?
Simulation is expensive
- Realistic configurations and sensitivity analysis difficult
- Larger design space, but more difficult to cover
Understanding of parallel programs as workloads is critical
- Particularly interaction of application and architectural parameters