Computer Systems Organization -- Performance of Systems.

As computers become more complex, the number and complexity of the tasks facing the computer architect have increased. Computer performance often depends in complex way on the design parameters and intuition that must be supplemented by performance studies to enhance design productivity. This book introduces computer architects to computer system performance models and shows how they are relatively simple, inexpensive to implement, and sufficiently accurate for most purposes. It discusses the development of performance models based on queuing theory and probability. The text also shows how they are used to provide quick approximate calculations to indicate basic performance tradeoffs and narrow the range of parameters to consider when determining system configurations. It illustrates how performance models can demonstrate how a memory system is to be configured, what the cache structure should be, and what incremental changes in cache size can have on the miss rate. A particularly deep knowledge of probability theory or any other mathematical field to understand the papers in this volume is not required.

The goal of this book is to present an overview of the current state-of-the-art in computer architecture performance evaluation. The book covers various aspects that relate to performance evaluation, ranging from performance metrics, to workload selection, to various modeling approaches such as analytical modeling and simulation. And because simulation is by far the most prevalent modeling technique in computer architecture evaluation, the book spends more than half its content on simulation, covering an overview of the various simulation techniques in the computer designer's toolbox, followed by various simulation acceleration techniques such as sampled simulation, statistical simulation, and parallel and hardware-accelerated simulation. The evaluation methods described in this book have a primary focus on performance. Although performance remains to be a key design target, it no longer is the sole design target. Power consumption and reliability have quickly become primary design concerns, and today they probably are as important as performance. Other important design constraints relate to cost, thermal issues, yield, etc. This book focuses on performance evaluation methods only. This does not compromise on the importance and general applicability of the techniques described in this book because power and reliability models are typically integrated into existing performance models. These integrated models pose similar challenges to the ones handled in this book. The book also focuses on presenting fundamental concepts and ideas. The book does not provide much quantitative data. Although quantitative data is crucial to performance evaluation, to understand the fundamentals of performance evaluation methods it is not. Moreover, quantitative data from different sources may be hard to compare, and may even be misleading, because the contexts in which the results were obtained may be very different - a comparison based on these numbe

Addresses the major issues involved in computer design and architectures. Dealing primarily with theory, tools, and techniques as related to advanced computer systems, it provides tutorials and surveys and relates new important research results. Each chapter provides background information, describes and analyzes important work done in the field, and provides important direction to the reader on future work and further readings. The topics covered include hierarchical design schemes, parallel and distributed modeling and simulation, parallel simulation tools and techniques, theoretical models for formal and performance modeling, and performance evaluation techniques.

These proceedings consist of papers presented at the International Workshop organized by the Commission of the European Communities, Joint Research Centre, Ispra Establishment, Department A, in Ispra (Varese) Italy, October 4-6, 1976. Topics addressed in this conference include probabilistic modeling of computer systems, analysis of schedules of computations and tasks, queueing networks, and simulation models. Applications include program behavior measurements and models, scheduling of multiprocessor systems, and reliable processing in the presence of system failures.