National Science Foundation

The phenomenal growth of the World Wide Web has resulted in the emergence and popularity of several new information technology related computer applications. The proliferation of web servers and arrival of electronic commerce has brought in several new software packages, interfaces and standards into picture. An end-to-end e-business transaction typically involves a dozen or more different software layers, including the front end/portal, shopping carts, network communication, credit card or electronic check transaction, security software layers, etc. These layers may be implemented using cgi-script, Java servlets, Java Beans, CORBA, JINI, etc. Thus emerging computer workloads involve the integration of a variety of software, protocols, and standards: GUIs, Java, cgi, perl, PHP, XML, SOAP, SQL, TCP/IP, HTTP, and HTML are just a few of them. Facilitating smooth use of the internet for emerging applications involves designing efficient computer systems and microprocessors for use in the computers that serve these applications. Most of these workloads are just emerging, and their behavior is not well-understood by computer designers and architects. The microprocessors that run these applications were designed before the advent of these workloads, and their architectural features may not be matching to the characteristics of these workloads. It is extremely important to identify features of these emerging workloads and tune microprocessors and computer systems to deliver highest performance on these workloads.

The proposed research consists of characterizing, understanding, and enhancing emerging workloads of the Information Technology era. It involves identifying where the cycles are gone during execution of these workloads, and identifying sources of loss of performance. The study will pin point bottlenecks, and identify architectural enhancements to improve performance. The primary step in the design process is workload characterization to unveil the features of the workloads. We will focus on Java, web server and database/transaction processing workloads. We will study Java workloads such as SPECJBB2000, Volanomark, and SPECjvm98, web server workloads such as SPECweb99, Netperf and webstone, and database workloads such as the Transaction Processing Council's TPC-C, TPC-W, TPC-R, and TPC-H. The performance monitoring counters present on commercial processors will be used for the first level of characterization followed by detailed complete system simulations for analyzing design tradeoffs.

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