TY - GEN
T1 - The ALPBench benchmark suite for complex multimedia applications
AU - Li, Man Lap
AU - Sasanka, Ruchira
AU - Adve, Sarita V.
AU - Chen, Yen Kuang
AU - Debes, Eric
PY - 2005
Y1 - 2005
N2 - Multimedia applications are becoming increasingly important for a large class of general-purpose processors. Contemporary media applications are highly complex and demand high performance. A distinctive feature of these applications is that they have significant parallelism, including thread-, data-, and instruction-level parallelism, that is potentially well-aligned with the increasing parallelism supported by emerging multi-core architectures. Designing systems to meet the demands of these applications therefore requires a benchmark suite comprising these complex applications and that exposes the parallelism present in them. This paper makes two contributions. First, it presents ALP-Bench, a publicly available benchmark suite that pulls together five complex media applications from various sources: speech recognition (CMU Sphinx 3), face recognition (CSU), ray tracing (Tachyon), MPEG-2 encode (MSSG), and MPEG-2 decode (MSSG). We have modified the original applications to expose thread-level and data-level parallelism using POSIX threads and sub-word SIMD (Intel's SSE2) instructions respectively. Second, the paper provides a performance characterization of the ALPBench benchmarks, with a focus on parallelism. Such a characterization is useful for architects and compiler writers for designing systems and compiler optimizations for these applications.
AB - Multimedia applications are becoming increasingly important for a large class of general-purpose processors. Contemporary media applications are highly complex and demand high performance. A distinctive feature of these applications is that they have significant parallelism, including thread-, data-, and instruction-level parallelism, that is potentially well-aligned with the increasing parallelism supported by emerging multi-core architectures. Designing systems to meet the demands of these applications therefore requires a benchmark suite comprising these complex applications and that exposes the parallelism present in them. This paper makes two contributions. First, it presents ALP-Bench, a publicly available benchmark suite that pulls together five complex media applications from various sources: speech recognition (CMU Sphinx 3), face recognition (CSU), ray tracing (Tachyon), MPEG-2 encode (MSSG), and MPEG-2 decode (MSSG). We have modified the original applications to expose thread-level and data-level parallelism using POSIX threads and sub-word SIMD (Intel's SSE2) instructions respectively. Second, the paper provides a performance characterization of the ALPBench benchmarks, with a focus on parallelism. Such a characterization is useful for architects and compiler writers for designing systems and compiler optimizations for these applications.
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U2 - 10.1109/IISWC.2005.1525999
DO - 10.1109/IISWC.2005.1525999
M3 - Conference contribution
AN - SCOPUS:33749052315
SN - 0780394615
SN - 9780780394612
T3 - Proceedings of the 2005 IEEE International Symposium on Workload Characterization, IISWC-2005
SP - 34
EP - 45
BT - Proceedings of the 2005 IEEE International Symposium on Workload Characterization, IISWC-2005
T2 - 2005 IEEE International Symposium on Workload Characterization, IISWC-2005
Y2 - 6 October 2005 through 8 October 2005
ER -