Memory Behavior of the SPEC2000 Benchmark Suite

Memory Behavior of the SPEC2000 Benchmark SuiteSuleyman Sair Mark CharneyIBM T.J. Watson Research CenterYorktown Heights, NY 10598ssair@cs.ucsd.edu mark charney@us.ibm.comAbstractThe SPEC CPU benchmarks are frequently used in computer architecture research. The newly released SPEC’2000benchmarks consist of fourteen floating point and twelve integer applications.In this paper we present measurements of number of cache misses for all the applications for a variety of cacheconfigurations. Prior studies have shown that SPEC benchmarks do not put much stress on the memory system. Oursimulation results demonstrate that SPEC’2000 places only modest pressure on the first level caches confirming theresults of similar experiments.1 IntroductionSPEC CPU benchmarks have long been used to gauge the performance of uniprocessor systems as well as micro-architectural enhancements. The newly released SPEC’2000 benchmark suite replaced the previous release, SPEC’95.Many studies [1, 3, 4]showed that only a few applications place more than modest stress on the memory system.The purpose of this study is to examine the memory behavior of the SPEC’2000 benchmark suite and determine howit compares to earlier releases of SPEC benchmarks.Table 1 and Table 2 [2] briefly summarize the SPEC’2000 CFP2000 floating point and CINT2000 integer bench-marks respectively. Memory footprint size for each application is also provided [5].The rest of the paper is organized as follows. In section 2 ...