Designing computer architecture research workloads

Although architectural simulators model microarchitectures at a high abstraction level, the increasing complexity of both the microarchitectures themselves and the applications that run on them make simulator use extremely time-consuming. Simulators must execute huge numbers of instructions to create a workload representative of real applications, creating an unreasonably long simulation time and stretching the time to market. Using reduced input sets instead of reference input sets helps to solve this problem. The authors have developed a methodology that reliably quantifies program behavior similarity to verify if reduced input sets result in program behavior similar to the reference inputs.