Memory System Characterization of Commercial Workloads

Commercial applications such as databases and Web servers constitute the largest and fastest-growing segment of the market for multiprocessor servers. Ongoing innovations in disk subsystems, along with the ever increasing gap between processor and memory speeds, have elevated memory system design as the critical performance factor for such workloads. However, most current server designs have been optimized to perform well on scientific and engineering workloads, potentially leading to design decisions that are non-ideal for commercial applications. The above problem is exacerbated by the lack of information on the performance requirements of commercial workloads, the lack of available applications for widespread study, and the fact that most representative applications are too large and complex to serve as suitable benchmarks for evaluating trade-offs in the design of processors and servers. This paper presents a detailed performance study of three important classes of commercial work...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 1998
• Where: ISCA
• Authors: Luiz André Barroso, Kourosh Gharachorloo, Edouard Bugnion
• Keywords: Commercial Workloads, Hardware, Index Search Workloads, ISCA 1998, Web Index Search