Workload Characterization For Computer System Design

The advent of the world-wide web and web-based applications have dramatically changed the nature of computer applications. Computer system design, in the light of these changes, involves understanding these modem workloads, identifying bottlenecks during their execution, and appropriately tailoring microprocessors, memory systems, and the overall system to minimize bottlenecks. This book contains ten chapters dealing with several contemporary programming paradigms including Java, web server and database workloads. The first two chapters concentrate on Java. While Barisone et al.'s characterization in Chapter 1 deals with instruction set usage of Java applications, Kim et al.'s analysis in Chapter 2 focuses on memory referencing behavior of Java workloads. Several applications including the SPECjvm98 suite are studied using interpreter and Just-In-Time (TIT) compilers. Barisone et al.'s work includes an analytical model to compute the utilization of various functional units. Kim et al. present information on locality, live-range of objects, object lifetime distribution, etc. Studying database workloads has been a challenge to research groups, due to the difficulty in accessing standard benchmarks. Configuring hardware and software for database benchmarks such as those from the Transactions Processing Council (TPC) requires extensive effort. In Chapter 3, Keeton and Patterson present a simplified workload (microbenchmark) that approximates the characteristics of complex standardized benchmarks.

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 characterizati on. File 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, KleinOsowski 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, http://www. spec. org/osg/cpu2000/research/umnl. 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 of programs. In Chapter 6, Thornock et al.

It is generally recognized that the characteristics of workload processing requests are among those parameters that critically affect the behaviour of a computer system. Therefore, the quantitative description of the processing requests, i.e. the workload characterization, is of fundamental importance in all performance evaluation problems, and is indispensable in the design of useful workload models. Now, for the first time, all problems related to workload characterization and modeling have been gathered together and analyzed in one volume. This book presents both the basic principles and the state-of-the-art in workload characterization of computer systems and computer networks, with special emphasis on experimental aspects. The methodologies and techniques currently used to characterize workloads for performance evaluation studies (tuning, design, selection, and capacity planning) are all adequately described. Invited Lectures: Workload Characterization in Distributed Environments (A.K. Agrawala and A.K. Thareja). Characterizing the Time Varying Nature of TSO Workloads (H.P. Artis). Workload Characterization Using SAS PROC FASTCLUS (H.P. Artis).

A book for experts and practitioners, emphasizing the intuition and reasoning behind definitions and derivations related to evaluating computer systems performance.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the Third European Performance Engineering Workshop, EPEW 2006, held in Budapest, Hungary in June 2006. The 16 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 40 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on stochastic process algebra, workloads and benchmarks, theory of stochastic processes, formal dependability and performance evaluation, as well as queues, theory and practice.

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