nLoad
A resource saturation, measurement and test orchestration package to stress test and establish safe operating regions for real-time computing platforms.
Shown here is a representative "slice" through a multi-dimensional manifold from nLoad data. The surface shows the incrementally induced stress and failure (red regions) as a result of multicore cache interference in a high performance processor. Failure is measured here in terms of observed utilization, as successive cores are loaded for various values of applications' read-write mix. Several other applications' characteristics (e.g., memory size) are held constant for this slice's visualization, but were varied in the stress test. Other failure metrics, e.g., power consumption overload, can also be used. Such infrastructure "characterization curves" and an estimation of current applications' operating point within it, plus the available margins constitute valuable data used in certifying a mission-critical system.
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Applied Research Transition Success StorynLoad was funded by the U. S. Air Force and developed in collaboration with Lockheed Martin. An example application to study multicore cache forced saturation is described here. nLoad has subsequently been extended to PCIe bus, network cards, and OS/Middleware message stacks.
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