Methods for Emulation of Multi-core CPU Performance

When validating or evaluating real distributed applications, it is useful to be able to test the application in a large range of environments. In that context, emulation of CPU performance enables researchers to investigate how the performance of the application is affected by the performance of the participating CPUs. Using a homogeneous cluster of fast multi-core nodes, it is therefore possible to evaluate how an application would behave on a heterogeneous set of nodes, with varying performance and number of cores. In this paper, three new methods for the emulation of CPU performance in the multi-core case are proposed: Fracas, CPU-Gov, and CPU-Hogs. Fracas relies on smart configuration of the Linux scheduler to achieve the desired emulation, CPU-Gov leverages the hardware CPU frequency scaling, and CPU-Hogs is a multi-core implementation of a CPU burner. These methods are compared and evaluated together with existing methods, with a set of micro-benchmarks, and show significant improvements over state-of-the-art solutions.