Measuring Temporal Locality Variation across Program Inputs

Since a program may have an infinite number of inputs, it is difficult to measure the exact performance under all possible uses. In this paper, we use the notion of reuse distance and reuse signature to measure the variation of data locality across program inputs. We use two classes of programs. The first is integer programs from SPEC 2000 benchmark set, including Vpr, Mcf, Parser, Perl, Gzip, and Bzip. For this set we test the current version from their open-source web sites instead of (or in addition to) the ones in the benchmark set. The second class is commonly used interactive programs, including Latex, Ghostview, and Gnuplot. We compare the reuse signature of 126 inputs for these 9 programs and show different degrees of locality variation. For most programs, the reuse signature is mostly consistent across inputs, indicating that the reuse pattern can be exploited in system design and optimization