Benchmark descriptions

We used several large programs with varied memory access patterns to study cache behavior. These programs are standardized benchmark programs from the SPECint 95 benchmark suite and the Mediabench[7] benchmark suite. We also used traces of some real programs in C++ and Java[8] to give a flavor of demands made by real-world programs. We chose these programs to give us a stable and large testing suite, which could reproducibly give us a series of memory accesses. These are not real applications, but they have been designed to mimic real applications in their characteristics. Also, these are large programs, and stress the cache system, with their large number of memory accesses.

Among the benchmark suites, the programs, for which we present the results later, are described below:

• IJPeg This is a image compression program. It is taken from the SPEC 95 integer benchmarks. It performs a series of compressions at differing quality levels over a variety of images. The workload is taken from the behavior of someone seeking the best trade-off between space and time for a variety of images.

• GO This is a program simulating the playing of the game GO. It has been taken from the SPEC 95 integer benchmarks. It plays the game of GO against itself, using pattern matching algorithms to search the search space. It is known not to use the cache very much, but performs initialization of a large data chunk.

• EPIC This is a experimental image data compression program. It is taken from the Mediabench benchmark suite. It uses algorithms specialized for images, such as wavelet decomposition to perform image compression.

• N-Queens This benchmark solves the N-Queens problem. This famous problem calculates the number of ways of placing N queens on a N by N chess board in non-attacking positions. Here N has been taken to be 10.

• Matrix multiplication This multiplies two N by N matrices together. The matrices are of size 64 by 64, and have random entries.

• Cellular Automaton This program simulates a 1 dimensional cellular automaton. The automaton has 1000 cells and is simulated for 100 time steps.

• Quicksort This program sorts a random array of 50,000 elements.

• Word frequency counter This program counts the frequency of the words appearing in its input, which is the Book of Revelation according to St John from the online version of the King James Bible.

• Linpack This is a port of the Linpack benchmark, a solver of simultaneous linear equations.

• Java Compiler This program is the Sun Java compiler, as a part of JDK 1.0.2.

• JavaCC Generated parser This is a Java parser, generated by the JavaCC parser-generator.

• Kawa This is a Scheme interpreter, written in Java. The program executed calculates the first 100 digits of Pi, using the Spigot algorithm .