Configurable workload generators for multicore architectures

Proposed multicore architectures are usually evaluated using two types of benchmarks: application and synthetic. Application benchmarks use well understood computations to generate well defined workloads. In contrast, synthetic benchmarks are tunable to generate a range of custom workloads. Both classes are currently limited. Existing application benchmarks are inflexible. And the options offered by synthetic benchmarks are too limited to generate a large variety of workload patterns. In this paper we propose novel workload generation methodologies that allow system developers to generate custom benchmarks for desired workload conditions for a variety of existing and multicore architectures. Specifically we describe two configurable workload generators, which we name ConWork and CompWork. ConWork is a configurable synthetic workload generator using which artificial traffic among the processors and memories can be generated. CompWork is a configurable computational workload generator, which can be used to specify vector and matrix applications so as to elicit the desired computational workloads among the processors. Together the two generators provide a number of options to generate workloads to evaluate a variety of performance metrics of existing and emerging multicore architectures including bus based SoCs, packet switching NoCs and hybrids.