Comparing the memory system performance of DSS commercial workload in HP V-class and SGI Origin 2000 multiprocessors

Due to the character of the original source materials and the nature of batch digitization, quality control issues may be present in this document. Please report any quality issues you encounter to digital@library.tamu.edu, referencing the URI of the item.Includes bibliographical references (leaves 60-62).Issued also on microfiche from Lange Micrographics.Commercial database workloads have surpassed scientific and technical workloads to become the largest market segment for shared memory multiprocessors. However not many studies have been done in the performance evaluation of those workloads in the public domain due to their complexity and high cost. In this thesis, we present a detailed and in-depth memory system performance analysis and comparison of TPC-H benchmark characteristics on SGI Origin 2000 and HP V-Class multiprocessors. The DSS workload is modeled after TPC-H benchmark. Our results show that the overall performance of TPC-H queries is comparable to that of technical workloads. Larger L1 instruction cache is helpful. The data cache performance differs depending on how the query accesses the tables. One single query process takes almost the same cycles in both machines. However, when multiple query processes run simultaneously on the system, running cycles tend to increase more in SGI Origin 2000 than in HP V-Class due to the more expensive communication overhead in SGI Origin 2000. The SGI Origin 2000 generally provides somewhat better cache performance than HP V-Class. Our study also examines the performance variation as the number of parallel query processes increases. The results show that there exists non-negligible data sharing between parallel query processes. The execution time, the data cache misses, the system time ratio and the context switches all increase when more query processes run. This shows the necessity of considering inter-query data sharing in DSS performance evaluation