Towards modeling & analysis of consolidated CMP servers

Abstract

As virtualization becomes ubiquitous in data centers, it becomes imperative that the definition of future multi-core platform architectures take into account the performance behavior and requirements of consolidated servers. However, performance analysis of commercial servers has traditionally been focused on individual parallel benchmarks running in dedicated mode. In this paper, we present an approach to developing a performance model for virtualized CMP servers potentially running heterogeneous workloads simultaneously. We show that a consolidation performance model can be developed by decomposing the problem into three constituent parts: (a) core interference due to consolidation, (b) cache interference due to consolidation and (c) virtualization overheads. Having laid out the consolidation framework, we then perform an initial case study with a new consolidation benchmark (vConsolidate). We present vConsolidate measurement characteristics on a Core 2 Duo-based server platform and then apply the performance model in order to predict the performance slowdown of each workload due to consolidation. We show that the model constructed is capable of achieving sufficient accuracy and discuss how to improve the accuracy in the future. Last but not least, we describe the extensions required to develop a complete generalized consolidation performance model.