Intel

The past 5 years have brought a significant change to the workloads running on computers including servers, desktops and PCs. In spite of the recent downturn in the information technology revolution, e-business and web servers based on client-server models are a dominant workload. Desktops and personal computers serve as clients for a variety of e-business applications. The workloads have become increasingly rich in multi-media, Java and object-oriented programming. Modern server applications involve the integration of a variety of software, protocols, and standards: CLI, .NET, Java, cgi, etc are just a few of them. The interplay between these components and their performance impact on state-of-the-art microprocessors has not been well understood. Understanding and improving contemporary workloads involves investigating the aforementioned layers. With the E-business still evolving, it is extremely difficult to create benchmarks or applications to use for a study on these workloads.

In this project, we propose a detailed characterization of emerging workloads such as Java, CLI/.NET on Intel processors. Among other components, CLI (Common Language Infrastructure) consists of a Common Language Specification (CLS) and a Virtual Execution System (VES). CLI is expected to form a unifying framework for designing, developing and deploying distributed components and applications. It is intended to support the complete implementation of a wide range of programming languages. CLS is an agreement between language designers and framework (library) designers. VES is responsible for loading and running programs written for the CLI. Thus the whole concept of CLI has some similarities and differences with Java. We will perform detailed characterizations and bottleneck analysis on these workloads.