Comparing Benchmarks Using Key Microarchitecture-Independent Characteristics

— Understanding the behavior of emerging workloads is important for designing next generation microprocessors. For addressing this issue, computer architects and performance analysts build benchmark suites of new application domains and compare the behavioral characteristics of these benchmark suites against well-known benchmark suites. Current practice typically compares workloads based on microarchitecture-dependent characteristics generated from running these workloads on real hardware. There is one pitfall though with comparing benchmarks using microarchitecture-dependent characteristics, namely that completely different inherent program behavior may yield similar microarchitecture-dependent behavior. This paper proposes a methodology for characterizing benchmarks based on microarchitecture-independent characteristics. This methodology minimizes the number of inherent program characteristics that need to be measured by exploiting correlation between program characteristics. In fa...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2006
• Where: IISWC
• Authors: Kenneth Hoste, Lieven Eeckhout
• Keywords: Benchmark Suites, IISWC 2006, Microarchitecture-dependent Characteristics, Operating Systems, Well-known Benchmark Suites