Workload characterization of emerging computer applications (Q2743236)

[The articles of this volume will not be indexed individually.]NEWLINENEWLINENEWLINEIntroduction: The formal study of program behavior has become an essential ingredient in guiding the design of new computer architectures. Accurate characterization of applications leads to efficient design of high performing architectures. Quantitative and analytical characterization of workloads is important to understand and exploit the interesting features of workloads. This book includes ten chapters on various aspects of workload characterization.NEWLINENEWLINENEWLINEFile caching characteristics of the industry-standard web-serving benchmark SPECweb99 are presented by Keller et al. in Chapter 1, while value locality of SPECJVM98 benchmarks are characterized by Rychlik et al. in Chapter 2. SPECJVM98 benchmarks are visited again in Chapter 3, where Tao et al. study the operating system activity in Java programs. In Chapter 4, Klein-Osowski et al. describe how the SPEC2000 CPU benchmark suite may be adapted for computer architecture research and present the small, representative input data sets they created to reduce simulation time without compromising on accuracy. Their research has been recognized by the Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation (SPEC) and is listed on the official SPEC website, \url{http://www.spec.org/osg/cpu2000/research/umn/}. The main contribution of Chapter 5 is the proposal of a new measure called locality surface to characterize locality of reference in programs. Sorenson et al. describe how a three-dimensional surface can be used to represent both temporal and spatial locality of programs. In Chapter 6, Thornock et al. describe the use of a hardware trace collection mechanism to generate traces of SPEC2000 programs. Chapter 7 is an effort by Lafage et al. to reduce simulation time by creating inputs which contain only slices of program execution. The challenge of course is to identify the representative slices. In Chapter 8, Kim et al. present the characterization of energy consumption of cache and memory modules under different configurations. Characterization, modeling and synthesis of I/O workloads is presented by Gomez et al. in Chapter 9. In Chapter 10, Bhargava et al. study the impact of operating system activity and context switching on microarchitecture. They utilize a hardware tracer on an AMD K6 processor running Windows NT to study operating system activity in a variety of workloads including database, desktop, and SPEC2000 programs.