Minimal Counters, Maximum Insight: Simplifying System Performance With HPC Clusters for Optimized Monitoring

As computer systems become more complex, evaluating performance requires tracking various hardware performance counters that capture the system’s internal activities. While these counters provide valuable insights, their growing number makes it challenging to identify the most relevant ones for performance analysis. In this paper, we investigate the correlation between performance counter values and overall system performance, while also exploring the inter-correlation between different counters. Our findings demonstrate that specific counters are strongly correlated with key performance metrics and that significant redundancy exists among counters. By leveraging these relationships, we propose a method for selecting a small, representative set of performance counters. This streamlined set can further be used to accurately predict performance score across various workloads and system configurations.