Servet: A benchmark suite for autotuning on multicore clusters

The growing complexity in computer system hierarchies due to the increase in the number of cores per processor, levels of cache (some of them shared) and the number of processors per node, as well as the high-speed interconnects, demands the use of new optimization techniques and libraries that take advantage of their features. In this paper Servet, a suite of benchmarks focused on detecting a set of parameters with high influence in the overall performance of multicore systems, is presented. These benchmarks are able to detect the cache hierarchy, including their size and which caches are shared by each core, bandwidths and bottlenecks in memory accesses, as well as communication latencies among cores. These parameters can be used by auto-tuned codes to increase their performance in multicore clusters. Experimental results using different representative systems show that Servet provides very accurate estimates of the parameters of the machine architecture.