The Return of Synthetic Benchmarks

Abstract

This paper describes a framework, BenchMaker, for constructing parameterized, scalable, synthetic benchmarks from a set of hardware-independent program characteristics. We show that with a suitable choice of a few inherent program characteristics related to the instruction mix, instruction-level parallelism, control flow behavior, and memory access patterns, it is possible to generate a synthetic benchmark whose performance directly relates to that of a real-world application. The parameterized nature of this framework enables the construction of synthetic benchmarks that allow researchers to explore a wider range of the application behavior space, even when no benchmarks yet exist. We evaluate the applicability and the usefulness of BenchMaker for studying the impact of program characteristics on performance and how they interact with processor microarchitecture. 1.