Welcome to Microprobe Documentation

Microprobe is a productive microbenchmark generation framework that an user can adapt towards exercising a complex multi-core, multi-threaded computing system in a variety of redundant ways for answering a range of questions related to energy and performance.

The growth in complexity of microprocessor systems today –composed of multi-core, multi-threaded processors with multi-level cache hierarchies and giga-bytes of memory–, hardens the pre-silicon system modeling and the post-silicon system characterizations. We believe that microbenchmarks, generated with particular objectives in mind, hold the key to obtaining accurate characterizations of microprocessor systems. Specially crafted microbenchmarks may be run on simulators (pre-silicon stage) or real machines (post-silicon stage) to help understand, diagnose and fix deficiencies systematically. However, manual generation of such “stress-marks” is tedious, and requires intimate knowledge of the underlying microarchitecture pipeline semantics. Automated microbenchmark generation is therefore crucial in this regard. Microprobe is developed to fulfill that need.

Learn more in the rest of the documentation.

Publications

If you use Microprobe in your research and development, we would appreciate a citation to the following paper in any publications you produce.

Ramon Bertran, Alper Buyuktosunoglu, Meeta S. Gupta, Marc Gonzalez, and Pradip Bose. 2012. Systematic Energy Characterization of CMP/SMT Processor Systems via Automated Micro-Benchmarks. In Proceedings of the 2012 45th Annual IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Microarchitecture (MICRO ‘12). IEEE Computer Society, Washington, DC, USA, 199-211. DOI=10.1109/MICRO.2012.27

A list of Publications using the Microprobe generator framework or microbenchmarks generated by Microprobe is also available. Please let us know if you publish a paper using Microprobe and we’ll update the list.