Session 11: Performance Analysis and Simulation ICPE ’19, April 7–11, 2019, Mumbai, India Memory Centric Characterization and Analysis of SPEC CPU2017 Suite Sarabjeet Singh Manu Awasthi
[email protected] [email protected] Ashoka University Ashoka University ABSTRACT These benchmarks have become the standard for any researcher or In this paper, we provide a comprehensive, memory-centric charac- commercial entity wishing to benchmark their architecture or for terization of the SPEC CPU2017 benchmark suite, using a number of exploring new designs. mechanisms including dynamic binary instrumentation, measure- The latest offering of SPEC CPU suite, SPEC CPU2017, was re- ments on native hardware using hardware performance counters leased in June 2017 [8]. SPEC CPU2017 retains a number of bench- and operating system based tools. marks from previous iterations but has also added many new ones We present a number of results including working set sizes, mem- to reflect the changing nature of applications. Some recent stud- ory capacity consumption and memory bandwidth utilization of ies [21, 24] have already started characterizing the behavior of various workloads. Our experiments reveal that, on the x86_64 ISA, SPEC CPU2017 applications, looking for potential optimizations to SPEC CPU2017 workloads execute a significant number of mem- system architectures. ory related instructions, with approximately 50% of all dynamic In recent years the memory hierarchy, from the caches, all the instructions requiring memory accesses. We also show that there is way to main memory, has become a first class citizen of computer a large variation in the memory footprint and bandwidth utilization system design.