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General Performance TrendsExperimentsExperimental MethodologyExploration

Exploration

This section demonstrates two approaches to using the Performance Explorer to investigate performance phenomena. The first approach uses the Performance Explorer to look for general trends over time. We discovered the following two unexpected instruction per cycle (IPC) trends:

Both trends were unknown before using the Performance Explorer. These trends over time would be difficult, if not impossible, to detect without a visualization tool.

The second approach uses the Performance Explorer to explore memory latency issues with respect to the POWER4 microarchitecture. Specifically, we used the Performance Explorer to explore the following questions:

Although the answers to these two questions might have been determined by performing a computation over the trace records directly, the Performance Explorer provides a unified approach to explore these questions.
General Performance TrendsExperimentsExperimental MethodologyExploration