On the Construction of a Representative Synthetic Workload

Abstract

A general method of constructing a drive workload representative of a real workload is described. The real workload is characterized by its demands on the various system resources. These characteristics of the real workload are obtained from the system accounting data. The characteristics of the drive workload are determined by matching the joint probability density of the real workload with that of the drive workload. The drive workload is realized by using a synthetic program in which the characteristics can be varied by varying the appropriate parameters. Calibration experiments are conducted to determine expressions relating the synthetic program parameters with the workload characteristics. The general method is applied to the case of two variables, cpu seconds and number of I/O activities; and a synthetic workload with 88 jobs is constructed to represent a month's workload consisting of about 6000 jobs. © 1974, ACM. All rights reserved.