Lizy Kurian John - Böcker

Computer and microprocessor architectures are advancing at an astounding pace. However, increasing demands on performance coupled with a wide variety of specialized operating environments act to slow this pace by complicating the performance evaluation process. Carefully balancing efficiency and accuracy is key to avoid slowdowns, and such a balance can be achieved with an in-depth understanding of the available evaluation methodologies. Performance Evaluation and Benchmarking outlines a variety of evaluation methods and benchmark suites, considering their strengths, weaknesses, and when each is appropriate to use.Following a general overview of important performance analysis techniques, the book surveys contemporary benchmark suites for specific areas, such as Java, embedded systems, CPUs, and Web servers. Subsequent chapters explain how to choose appropriate averages for reporting metrics and provide a detailed treatment of statistical methods, including a summary of statistics, how to apply statistical sampling for simulation, how to apply SimPoint, and a comprehensive overview of statistical simulation. The discussion then turns to benchmark subsetting methodologies and the fundamentals of analytical modeling, including queuing models and Petri nets. Three chapters devoted to hardware performance counters conclude the book.Supplying abundant illustrations, examples, and case studies, Performance Evaluation and Benchmarking offers a firm foundation in evaluation methods along with up-to-date techniques that are necessary to develop next-generation architectures.

Written for an advanced-level course in digital systems design, DIGITAL SYSTEMS DESIGN USING VHDL integrates the use of the industry-standard hardware description language VHDL into the digital design process. Following a review of basic concepts of logic design, the author introduces the basics of VHDL, and then incorporates more coverage of advanced VHDL topics. Rather than simply teach VHDL as a programming language, this book emphasizes the practical use of VHDL in the digital design process.

The formal study of programme behaviour has become an essential ingredient in guiding the design of new computer architectures. Accurate characterization of applications leads to efficient design of high performing architectures. Quantitative and analytical characterization of workloads is important in understanding and exploiting their interesting features. This book includes ten chapters on various aspects of characterization. The contributors to this volume are internationally recognized experts whose experience spans both industrial applications and the academic community.

This text contains ten chapters dealing with contemporary programming paradigms such as Java, web server, and database workloads. It should be of interest to those in industry and academia whose work involves estimating workloads for system design. The coverage includes: two chapters on Java; one chapter on database workload benchmarks; two chapters on web server workloads; one chapter on natural I/O applications; one chapter on network interface workloads; one chapter on control independence in programs; two chapters on system-level characterization of two- and three-dimensional graphics applications on personal PCs.

Computer and microprocessor architectures are advancing at an astounding pace. However, increasing demands on performance coupled with a wide variety of specialized operating environments act to slow this pace by complicating the performance evaluation process. Carefully balancing efficiency and accuracy is key to avoid slowdowns, and such a balance can be achieved with an in-depth understanding of the available evaluation methodologies. Performance Evaluation and Benchmarking outlines a variety of evaluation methods and benchmark suites, considering their strengths, weaknesses, and when each is appropriate to use.Following a general overview of important performance analysis techniques, the book surveys contemporary benchmark suites for specific areas, such as Java, embedded systems, CPUs, and Web servers. Subsequent chapters explain how to choose appropriate averages for reporting metrics and provide a detailed treatment of statistical methods, including a summary of statistics, how to apply statistical sampling for simulation, how to apply SimPoint, and a comprehensive overview of statistical simulation. The discussion then turns to benchmark subsetting methodologies and the fundamentals of analytical modeling, including queuing models and Petri nets. Three chapters devoted to hardware performance counters conclude the book.Supplying abundant illustrations, examples, and case studies, Performance Evaluation and Benchmarking offers a firm foundation in evaluation methods along with up-to-date techniques that are necessary to develop next-generation architectures.

The formal study of program behavior has become an essential ingredient in guiding the design of new computer architectures. Accurate characterization of applications leads to efficient design of high performing architectures. Quantitative and analytical characterization of workloads is important to understand and exploit the interesting features of workloads. This book includes ten chapters on various aspects of workload characterizati on. File caching characteristics of the industry-standard web-serving benchmark SPECweb99 are presented by Keller et al. in Chapter 1, while value locality of SPECJVM98 benchmarks are characterized by Rychlik et al. in Chapter 2. SPECJVM98 benchmarks are visited again in Chapter 3, where Tao et al. study the operating system activity in Java programs. In Chapter 4, KleinOsowski et al. describe how the SPEC2000 CPU benchmark suite may be adapted for computer architecture research and present the small, representative input data sets they created to reduce simulation time without compromising on accuracy. Their research has been recognized by the Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation (SPEC) and is listed on the official SPEC website, http://www. spec. org/osg/cpu2000/research/umnl. The main contribution of Chapter 5 is the proposal of a new measure called locality surface to characterize locality of reference in programs. Sorenson et al. describe how a three-dimensional surface can be used to represent both of programs. In Chapter 6, Thornock et al.