Profiling application resource usage

Inside View

Article from ADMIN 13/2013

By Jeff Layton

Computing hardware is constantly changing, with new CPUs and accelerators, and the integration of both. How do you know which processors are right for your code?

Know your enemy and know yourself, and you can fight a hundred battles without disaster . – Sun Tzu

There are three things extremely hard: steel, a diamond, and to know one's self. – Benjamin Franklin

Some big changes are happening in the processor world right now. For the past 15 years or so, both the HPC world and the enterprise world have settled on, for the most part, x86 as the processor technology. Although other processor technologies, such as IBM's Power architecture, are still being used, it is at a much lower level relative to x86.

In the past few years, the development of accelerators, such as GPUs (graphical processing units); dedicated processors that use lots of classic x86 cores, such as the Intel Xeon Phi; FPGAs (field-programmable gate arrays); and DSPs (digital signal processors) have risen in popularity. These accelerators have the potential to provide much better performance in applications and algorithms that can take advantage of them compared with conventional CPUs. And, the performance per watt for these accelerators makes them compelling for a range of application classes.

Within this group of processors that are not based on x86, the best known alternative is ARM [1], which has spun off solutions such as the Raspberry Pi, and some of the server-oriented products that Dell, HP, and Boston Limited have discussed. Even AMD has announced that they will create a 64-bit ARM processor based on their Opteron processors.

These ARM-based processors are focused on very power efficient computing; that is, doing reasonable amounts of computing with very low power levels. Integrators take the ARM processors and create Systems on a Chip (SoCs) that combine the processor and the ancillary chips and interface into a very small package that uses, typically, less than 15W under load.

The Chinese government is also investing in some new

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