2017 conference paper

Clone morphing: Creating new workload behavior from existing applications

Ieee international symposium on performance analysis of systems and, 97–107.

co-author countries: United States of America πŸ‡ΊπŸ‡Έ
Source: NC State University Libraries
Added: August 6, 2018

Computer system designers need a deep understanding of end users' workload in order to arrive at an optimum design. However, current design practices suffer from two problems: time mismatch where designers rely on workloads available today to design systems that will be produced years into the future to run future workloads, and sparse behavior where many performance behavior is not represented by the limited set of applications available today. We propose clone morphing, a systematic method for producing new synthetic workloads (morphs) with performance behavior that does not currently exist. The morphs are generated automatically without knowing or changing the original application's source code. There are three different aspects a morph can differ from the original benchmark it is built on: temporal locality, spatial locality, and memory footprint. We showed how each of these aspects can be varied largely independently of other aspects. Furthermore, we also presented a method for merging two different applications into one that has an average behavior of both applications. We evaluated the morphs by running them on simulators and collect statistics that capture their behavior, and validated that morphs can be used for projecting future workloads and for generating new behavior that fills up the behavior map densely.