COMPUTER SYSTEM EVALUATION WITH COMMERCIAL WORKLOADS

Instruction-level simulation techniques are the predominant approach to evaluate the impact of architectural design alternatives on the performance of computer systems. Previous simulation approaches have not been capable of executing unmodified system as well as application software at an acceptable performance level. Commercial applications, such as databases, constitute a particular challenge. The SIM ICS/sun4m platform has been designed to efficiently execute completely unmodified software binaries, such as databases and operating systems. Moreover, it is possible to flexibly model a variety of computer system architectures. We describe in this paper how the platform is used (i) for software development and application performance tuning for a given hardware architecture, (ii) for evaluation of performance increasing architectural modifications with focus on a particular application, and (iii) for combined performance increasing measures of both the hardware architecture and the software system.

[1]  R. Bedicheck.  Some efficient architecture simulation tech-niques , 1990 .

[2]  Johan Montelius,et al.  Using SimICS to Evaluate the Penny System , 1997, ILPS.

[3]  Peter S. Magnusson,et al.  Efficient memory simulation in SimICS , 1995, Proceedings of Simulation Symposium.

[4]  Lance M. Berc,et al.  Continuous profiling: where have all the cycles gone? , 1997, TOCS.

[5]  Anoop Gupta,et al.  Complete computer system simulation: the SimOS approach , 1995, IEEE Parallel Distributed Technol. Syst. Appl..

[6]  Ann Marie Grizzaffi Maynard,et al.  Contrasting characteristics and cache performance of technical and multi-user commercial workloads , 1994, ASPLOS VI.

[7]  Peter S. Magnusson,et al.  A hybrid simulation approach enabling performance characterization of large software systems , 1997, Proceedings Fifth International Symposium on Modeling, Analysis, and Simulation of Computer and Telecommunication Systems.

[8]  Håkan Grahn,et al.  SimICS/Sun4m: A Virtual Workstation , 1998, USENIX Annual Technical Conference.

[9]  Erik Hagersten,et al.  Trends in Shared Memory Multiprocessing , 1997, Computer.

[10]  Peter S. Magnusson.  Simulation of parallel hardware , 1993 .

[11]  Anoop Gupta,et al.  The SPLASH-2 programs: characterization and methodological considerations , 1995, ISCA.

[12]  Naomi Nishimura,et al.  Parallel pointer-based join algorithms in memory mapped environments , 1996, Proceedings of the Twelfth International Conference on Data Engineering.

[13]  Josep Torrellas,et al.  The memory performance of DSS commercial workloads in shared-memory multiprocessors , 1997, Proceedings Third International Symposium on High-Performance Computer Architecture.

[14]  Scott Devine,et al.  Using the SimOS machine simulator to study complex computer systems , 1997, TOMC.

[15]  Michael Stonebraker,et al.  The Implementation of Postgres , 1990, IEEE Trans. Knowl. Data Eng..

[16]  Hans-Peter Kriegel,et al.  Parallel processing of spatial joins using R-trees , 1996, Proceedings of the Twelfth International Conference on Data Engineering.