I think the author has computer science and computer engineering confused.
How Not to Measure Computer System Performance
11–14 of 14 posts
Re: How Not to Measure Computer System Performance
#12There are lies, damned lies, and software benchmarks.
Lies, damn lies, and $100 million investments.
Re: How Not to Measure Computer System Performance
#13I think the author has computer science and computer engineering confused.
I don't think he does. What he describes is part of what myself and my colleagues consider "computer science." We typically consider "computer engineering" the design and making of hardware. But to be a systems researcher in computer science, you must know how these things work, and be able to reason about how they affect the software systems you care about.
Re: How Not to Measure Computer System Performance
#14Earlier quoted context omitted.
Guessing, locality of reference might play a role.
That, the branch predictors, and caching behaviors, n-way, alignment, etc. It probably explains why different runs vary so widely, I always thought it was other things going on in the OS, never really thought about the caches, etc.
> That, the branch predictors, and caching behaviors, n-way, alignment, etc.
Those all fall under locality of reference, btw. But yeah cache and branch prediction play a huge role in the list.
One thing that stung me in the past was OS scheduling.