Simulation points for SPEC CPU 2006

Abstract

Increasing sizes of benchmarks make detailed simulation an extremely time consuming process. Statistical techniques such as the SimPoint methodology have been proposed in order to address this problem during the initial design phase. The SimPoint methodology attempts to identify repetitive, long, large-grain phases in programs and predict the performance of the architecture based on its aggregate performance on the individual phases. This study attempts to compare accuracy of the SimPoint methodology for the SPEC CPU 2006 benchmark suite with that of SPEC CPU 2000 and to study the large-grain phases in the two benchmark suites using the SimPoint methodology. We find that there has not been a significant increase in the number of simulation points required to accurately predict the behavior of the programs in SPEC CPU 2006, despite its significantly larger data footprint and dynamic instruction count. We also find that the programs in both benchmark suites have similar characteristics in terms of the number of phases that contribute significantly towards overall behavior, further emphasizing the similarity between the two benchmark suites with respect to the number of simulation points required for similar accuracies.