Fast System Level Benchmarks for Multicore Architectures

Abstract

We present a framework that automatically generates system level synthetic benchmarks from traditional benchmarks. Synthetic benchmarks have similar performance behavior as the original benchmarks that they are generated from and they can run faster. Synthetics can also be used as proxies where original applications are not available in source form. In experiments we observe that not only are our system level benchmarks much smaller than the real benchmarks that they are generated from but they are also much faster. For example, when we generate synthetic benchmarks from the well-known multicore benchmark suite, PARSEC, our benchmarks have an average speedup of 149x over PARSEC benchmarks. We also observe that the performance behavior of synthetics have more than 85% similarity to the real benchmarks.