REALISTIC PARALLEL PERFORMANCE ESTIMATION

This paper presents an account of two tools which enable realistic par allel performance estimates to be obtained in reasonable time. The fir st tool, PERFORM (performance estimator for RISC microprocessors), is a general purpose package for sequential program performance estimatio n on modem RISC microprocessor nodes with complex memory hierarchies, The novelty of the tool is that we have chosen an intermediate level o f abstraction between simple statement counting and full simulation of the node architecture. The second tool, LEBEP, generates synthetic pa rallel programs from a simple communication specification. In particul ar, it can rate communication operations that incurs typical communica tion overhead, including data movements across different levels in the memory hierarchy.