Generation, Validation and Analysis of SPEC CPU2006 Simulation Points Based on Branch, Memory and TLB Characteristics

Abstract

The SPEC CPU2006 suite, released in Aug 2006 is the current industry-standard, CPU-intensive benchmark suite, created from a collection of popular modern workloads. But, these workloads take machine weeks to months of time when fed to cycle accurate simulators and have widely varying behavior even over large scales of time [1]. It is to be noted that we do not see simulation based papers using SPEC CPU2006 even after 1.5 years of its release. A well known technique to solve this problem is the use of simulation points [2]. We have generated the simulation points for SPEC CPU2006 and made it available at [3]. We also report the accuracies of these simulation points based on the CPI, branch misspredictions, cache & TLB miss ratios by comparing with the full runs for a subset of the benchmarks. It is to be noted that the simulation points were only used for cache, branch and CPI studies until now and this is the first attempt towards validating them for TLB studies. They have also been found to be equally representative in depicting the TLB characteristics. Using the generated simulation points, we provide an analysis of the behavior of the workloads in the suite for different branch predictor & cache configurations and report the optimally performing configurations. The simulations for the different TLB configurations revealed that usage of large page sizes significantly reduce the translation misses and aid in improving the overall CPI of the modern workloads.