Characterizing the Unique and Diverse Behaviors in Existing and Emerging General-Purpose and Domain-Specific Benchmark Suites

Characterizing and understanding emerging workload behavior is of vital importance to ensure next generation microprocessors perform well on their anticipated future workloads. This paper compares a number of benchmark suites from emerging application domains, such as bio-informatics (BioPerf), biometrics (BioMetricsWork-load) and multimedia (MediaBench II), against general-purpose workloads represented by SPEC CPU2000 and CPU2006. Although these benchmark suites have been characterized before, prior work did not capture the benchmark suites' inherent (microarchitecture-independent) behavior nor did they provide a phase-level characterization. In this paper we characterize these existing and emerging general-purpose and domain-specific benchmark suites in terms of their inherent phase-level behaviors. Our characterization methodology identifies prominent phase behaviors across benchmarks and visualizes them in terms of their key microarchitecture-independent characteristics. From this analysis, next to revealing a detailed picture of the distinct phase-level behaviors in these benchmark suites, we also obtain a number of interesting high-level insights. For example, SPEC CPU2006 turns out to be the benchmark suite with the largest workload space coverage, i.e., it covers the largest set of distinct behaviors in the workload space. Also, our analysis provides experimental evidence supporting the intuitive understanding that domain-specific benchmark suites cover a narrower range in the workload space than general-purpose benchmark suites. Finally, the BioPerf bio-informatics benchmark suite exhibits a large fraction unique behaviors not observed in the general-purpose benchmark suites, substantially more so than the other domain-specific benchmark suites, BioMetricsWorkload and MediaBench II