Profiling CPU-bound workloads on Intel Haswell-EP platforms

With the increasing adoption of public and private cloud resources to support the demands in terms of computing capacity of the WLCG, the HEP community has begun studying several benchmarking applications aimed at continuously assessing the performance of virtual machines procured from commercial providers. In order to characterise the behaviour of these benchmarks, in-depth profiling activities have been carried out. In this document we outline our experience in profiling one specific application, the ATLAS Kit Validation, in an attempt to explain an unexpected distribution in the performance samples obtained on systems based on Intel Haswell-EP processors.