Memory system characterization of commercial workloads

Abstract

A detailed performance study is presented of three important classes of commercial workloads: online transaction processing (OLTP), decision support system (DSS), and Web index search. The oracle commercial database engine is used for the OLTP and DSS workloads, and the Alta Vista search engine for the Web index search workload. The memory system behavior of these workloads is characterized through a large number of architectural experiments on Alpha multiprocessors augmented with full system simulations to determine the impact of architectural trends. A set of simplifications that make these workloads more amenable to monitoring and simulation without affecting representative memory system behavior are identified. It is observed 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.