Exploiting program microarchitecture independent characteristics and phase behavior for reduced benchmark suite simulation

Eeckhout, Lieven; Sampson, John J.; Calder, Brad

doi:10.1109/iiswc.2005.1525996

Cited by 55 publications

(37 citation statements)

References 23 publications

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“…This is an advance over prior work done on characterizing workloads through principal components analysis (PCA) [7], [8], [9], [16], [17]. The goal of PCA is to remove correlation from a data set so that the original data set can be faithfully represented by a lower-dimensional data set.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Comparing Benchmarks Using Key Microarchitecture-Independent Characteristics

Hoste

Eeckhout

2006

2006 IEEE International Symposium on Workload Characterization

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Abstract-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 fact, we reduce our 47-dimensional space to an 8-dimensional space without compromising the methodology's ability to compare benchmarks. The important benefits of this methodology are that (i) only a limited number of microarchitecture-independent characteristics need to be measured, and (ii) the resulting workload characterization is easy to interpret. Using this methodology we compare 122 benchmarks from 6 recently proposed benchmark suites. We conclude that some benchmarks in emerging benchmark suites are indeed similar to benchmarks from well-known benchmark suites as suggested through a microarchitecture-dependent characterization. However, other benchmarks are dissimilar based on a microarchitecture-independent characterization although a microarchitecture-dependent characterization suggests the opposite to be true.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Comparing Benchmarks Using Key Microarchitecture-Independent Characteristics

Hoste

Eeckhout

2006

2006 IEEE International Symposium on Workload Characterization

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“…Eeckhout et al [5] further extended this workload analysis approach by looking into similarities between program-input pairs at the phase level. Instead of measuring aggregate microarchitecture-independent metrics over the complete benchmark execution, they measure those metrics at the phase level.…”

Section: Workload Analysis Through Pcamentioning

confidence: 99%

Representative Multiprogram Workloads for Multithreaded Processor Simulation

Biesbrouck

Eeckhout

Calder

2007

2007 IEEE 10th International Symposium on Workload Characterization

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Almost all new consumer-grade processors are capable of executing multiple programs simultaneously. The analysis of multiprogrammed workloads for multicore and SMT processors is challenging and time-consuming because there are many possible combinations of benchmarks to execute and each combination may exhibit several different interesting behaviors. Missing particular combinations of program behaviors could hide performance problems with designs. It is thus of utmost importance to have a representative multiprogrammed workload when evaluating multithreaded processor designs.This paper presents a methodology that uses phase analysis, principal components analysis (PCA) and cluster analysis (CA) applied to microarchitectureindependent program characteristics in order to find important program interactions in multiprogrammed workloads. The end result is a small set of co-phases with associated weights that are representative for a multiprogrammed workload across multithreaded processor architectures. Applying our methodology to the SPEC CPU 2000 benchmark suite yields 50 distinct combinations for two-context multithreaded processor simulation that researchers and architects can use for simulation. Each combination is simulated for 50 million instructions, giving a total of 2.5 billion instructions to be simulated for the SPEC CPU2000 benchmark suite. The performance prediction error with these representative combinations is under 2.5% of the real workload for absolute throughput prediction and can be used to make relative throughput comparisons across processor architectures.

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“…They demonstrate that the program characteristics from performance counter style characterization can be misleading. As an example of the utility of these metrics, Eeckhout, et al, demonstrate that microarchitecture-independent characteristics can be used to determine benchmark similarity, with the goal of sampling representative programs from the benchmarks suite [6]. In both cases, Alpha ISA traces are used to analyze microarchitecture-independent behavior.…”

Section: B Microarchitecture-independent Characterizationmentioning

confidence: 99%

ISA-independent workload characterization and its implications for specialized architectures

Shao

Brooks

2013

2013 IEEE International Symposium on Performance Analysis of Systems and Software (ISPASS)

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Abstract-Specialized architectures will become increasingly important as the computing industry demands more energyefficient designs. The application-centric design style for these architectures is heavily dependent on workload characterization of intrinsic program characteristics, but at the same time these architectures are likely to be decoupled from legacy ISAs. In this work, we perform ISA-independent workload characterization for a variety of important intrinsic program characteristics relating to computation, memory, and control flow. The analysis is performed using a JIT compiler that emits ISA-independent instructions. We compare this analysis with an x86 trace and find that several of the analyses are highly sensitive to the ISA. We conclude that designers of specialized architectures must adopt ISA-independent workload characterization approaches.

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Exploiting program microarchitecture independent characteristics and phase behavior for reduced benchmark suite simulation

Cited by 55 publications

References 23 publications

Comparing Benchmarks Using Key Microarchitecture-Independent Characteristics

Comparing Benchmarks Using Key Microarchitecture-Independent Characteristics

Representative Multiprogram Workloads for Multithreaded Processor Simulation

ISA-independent workload characterization and its implications for specialized architectures

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