Performance Characterization of a Dual Quad-Core Based Application Oriented Networking System

In this paper, we investigate performance characteristics of an Application Oriented Networking (AON) system based on Intelpsilas dual quad-core Xeon E5335 processors. This dual quad-core based AON system has unique hierarchical cache architecture, mainly local, neighboring, and remote L2 caches. Using on-chip processor counters, we observe that shared memory based communication latency between a pair of threads is non-uniform depending on theircore affinities, which may vary by more than an order of magnitude. In addition, we show that CPU-intensive applications scale better than I/O-intensive applications as the number of processor cores increases.