Category: benchmark
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Benchmarking string search algorithms
Searching a sequence of items for occurrences of a specific pattern is a common operation, and researchers are still discovering faster string search algorithms. While skimming the paper Efficient Exact Online String Matching Through Linked Weak Factors by M. N. Palmer, S. Faro, and S. Scafiti, Tables 1, 2 and 3 jumped out at me. […]
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CPU frequency not relevant to SPEC benchmark performance
Despite the end of Dennard scaling around 2005-7 computer performance, as measured by the SPEC cpu benchmarks, continues to improve. What is driving this ongoing increase in performance, given that cpu clock rates have stopped increasing? The plot below shows 9,161 results from the SPEC CPU integer benchmark, plus the fitted regression line (code+data): There […]
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Memory bandwidth: 1991-2009
The Stream benchmark is a measure of sustained memory bandwidth; the target systems are high performance computers. Sustained in the sense of distance running, rather than a short sprint (the term for this is peak memory bandwidth and occurs when the requested data is in cache), and bandwidth in the sense of bytes of memory […]
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Techniques used for analyzing basic performance measurements
The statistical design and analysis of experiments is a relatively recent invention (around 150 years old; verifying scientific hypotheses using experiments was first proposed over 1,000 years ago). Once an experiment has been run, and performance measurements collected, what techniques are available to analyse the data? Before electronic computers were invented, the practical statistical techniques […]