Design of Hardware-Based Communication Performance Measurement Tool

With the popularity and development of heterogeneous computing, proper communication performance measurement tools are needed to explore new communication patterns under heterogeneous computing systems and optimize program´s performance. This paper proposes a hardware-based communication performance measurement tool, named as HCPM, which brings little influence on original program, and can collect communication traces generated by heterogeneous processors which implement PCIe or HT as their system bus. HCPM firstly provides basic communication primitives to set up a communication system. Then based on these primitives, it collects communication trace. Real-time collected traces are transmitted to a dedicated computer for further analysis. Evaluation shows that with the use of proper compression in hardware, HCPM can transmit at least five processors´ communication traces with a single Gigabit Ethernet link.