Memory system characterization of commercial workloads

Author

Barroso, Luiz André ; Gharachorloo, Kourosh ; Bugnion, Edouard

Author_Institution

Western Res. Lab., Digital Equip. Corp., USA

fYear

1998

fDate

27 Jun-1 Jul 1998

Firstpage

3

Lastpage

14

Abstract

This paper presents a detailed performance study of three important classes of commercial workloads: online transaction processing (OLTP), decision support systems (DSS), and Web index search. We use the Oracle commercial database engine for our OLTP and DSS workloads, and the AltaVista search engine for our Web index search workload. This study characterizes the memory system behavior of these workloads through a large number of architectural experiments on Alpha multiprocessors augmented with full system simulations to determine the impact of architectural trends. We also identify a set of simplifications that make these workloads more amenable to monitoring and simulation without affecting representative memory system behavior. We observe that systems optimized for OLTP versus DSS and index search workloads may lead to diverging designs, specifically in the size and speed requirements for off-chip caches

Keywords

database management systems; decision support systems; parallel architectures; shared memory systems; transaction processing; Alpha multiprocessors; AltaVista search engine; Oracle commercial database engine; Web index search; commercial workloads; decision support systems; full system simulations; memory system behavior; memory system characterization; monitoring; online transaction processing; performance study; representative memory system behavior; simulation; Application software; Databases; Decision support systems; Delay; Design engineering; Design optimization; Engines; Laboratories; Technological innovation; Web server;

fLanguage

English

Publisher

ieee

Conference_Titel

Computer Architecture, 1998. Proceedings. The 25th Annual International Symposium on

Conference_Location

Barcelona

ISSN

1063-6897

Print_ISBN

0-8186-8491-7

Type

conf

DOI

10.1109/ISCA.1998.694758

Filename

694758