Temporal characterization of SPEC CPU2006 workloads: Analysis and synthesis

Abstract

SPEC CPU2006 benchmark suite has been extensively studied, with efforts focusing on the requirement understanding of memory workloads from the SPEC CPU2006 suite. However, characterizing SPEC CPU2006 workloads from a time dependence perspective has attracted little attention. This paper studies the auto-correlation functions of the arrival intervals of memory accesses in all SPEC CPU2006 traces, and concludes that correlations in memory inter-access times are inconsistent, either with evident correlations or with little and no correlation. Different with the studies focused on the prior suites, we present that self-similarity exists only in a small number of SPEC2006 workloads. In addition, we implement a memory access series generator in which the inputs are the measured properties of the available trace data. Experimental results show that this model can more accurately emulate the complex access arrival behaviors of real memory systems than the conventional self-similar and independent identically distributed methods, particularly the heavy-tail characteristics under both Gaussian and non-Gaussian workloads.