GeST: An Automatic Framework For Generating CPU Stress-Tests
Date
2019Author
Hadjilambrou, ZachariasDas, Shidhartha
Whatmough, Paul N
Bull, David
Sazeides, Yiannakis
Source
2019 IEEE International Symposium on Performance Analysis of Systems and Software (ISPASS)Pages
1-10Google Scholar check
Metadata
Show full item recordAbstract
This work presents GeST (Generator for Stress-Tests): a framework for automatically generating CPU stress-tests. The framework is based on genetic algorithm search and can be used to maximize different target CPU metrics such as power, temperature, instructions executed per cycle and dl/dt voltage noise. We demonstrate the generality and effectiveness of the framework by generating various workloads that stress the CPU power, thermal and voltage margins more than both conventional benchmarks and manually written stress-tests. The key framework strengths are its extensibility and flexibility. The user can specify custom measurement and fitness functions as well as the CPU instructions that will be used in the genetic algorithm search. The paper demonstrates the framework prowess by using it with simple and complex fitness functions to generate stress-tests: a) for various platform types ranging from low-power mobile ARM CPUs to high-power x86 CPUs and b) with different measurement instruments such as oscilloscopes and software accessible performance counters and sensors.