What Factors Affect the Performance of Software after Migration: A Case Study on Sunway TaihuLight Supercomputer

Abstract

Due to the rapid development of different processors, e.g., x86 and Sunway, software porting between different platforms is becoming more frequent. However, the migrated software's execution efficiency on the target platform is different from that of the source platform, and most of the previous studies have investigated the improvement of the efficiency from the hardware perspective. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first paper to exclusively focus on studying what software factors can result in performance change after software migration. To perform our study, we used SonarQube to detect and measure five software factors, namely Duplicated Lines (DL), Code Smells Density (CSD), Big Functions (BF), Cyclomatic Complexity (CC), and Complex Functions (CF), from 13 selected projects of SPEC CPU2006 benchmark suite. Then, we measured the change of software performance by calculating the acceleration ratio of execution time before (x86) and after (Sunway) software migration. Finally, we performed a multiple linear regression model to analyze the relationship between the software performance change and the software factors. The results indicate that the performance change of software migration from the x86 platform to the Sunway platform is mainly affected by three software factors, i.e., Code Smell Density (CSD), Cyclomatic Complexity (CC), and Complex Functions (CF). The findings can benefit both researchers and practitioners.