Overview
Detailed modeling of the performance of large applications is difficult. Applications can take a very long time to run on real hardware, and it is impractical to simulate them to completion on modern, detailed performance models. Furthermore, some applications have complex operating environments that cannot easily be reproduced on a simulator, so properly setting up the applications to run on a variety of simulators can be difficult.
The PinPoints methodology addresses these problems using the well-known SimPoint tool to determine representative portions of an application for simulation and Pin to avoid tedious and error-prone application setup altogether. The resulting representative simulation regions, called PinPoints, can then be used for simulation and performance projection instead of simulating the entire application. This results in a drastic reduction in simulation time. Using the Pin-based program-capture and deterministic replay framework called PinPlay enables the repeatability of PinPoints for single and multithreaded programs.
Note PinPoints methodology works with Intel® Software Development Emulator (Intel® SDE) version 7.45 and later.
Tutorial
Related Content
- Intel SDE and PinPoints Information on GitHub*
- Intel SDE Overview
- Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation* (SPEC) CPU2006 and Simulation
- More About Pinballs from Sniper
- SimPoint: Automatically Characterizing Large-Scale Program Behavior
- PinPoint Representative Portions of Large Intel® Itanium® Programs with Dynamic Instrumentation
- PinPlay: A Framework for Deterministic Replay and Reproducible Analysis of Parallel Programs
- LoopPoint: Checkpoint-Driven Sampled Simulation for Multithreaded Applications