Directly characterizing cross core interference through contention synthesis

In this paper, we present a direct methodology and framework for the measurement and characterization of an application's cross-core interference sensitivity on multicore microarchitectures. While prior works use indirect indicators, such as last level cache miss rate, to infer an application's cross-core interference sensitivity, our approach is direct, in that it characterizes the application's cross-core interference sensitivity using the performance impact due to actual contention. Our methodology and framework, the Cross-core interference Profiling Environment, or CiPE, is composed of a lightweight runtime environment on which a host application runs, along with a carefully designed contention synthesis engine that executes on a neighboring core. CiPE manipulates the co-running contention synthesis engine, while monitoring and analyzing the resulting dynamic impact on the host application.