13154758
Design and characterization of the Berkeley multimedia workload
Abstract. The last decade has seen the integration of audio, video, and 3D graphics into existing workloads as well as the emergence of new workloads dominated by the processing of these forms of media. Unfortunately, widely accepted benchmarks which capture these new workloads in a realistic way have not emerged. The goal of this paper is to present the Berkeley multimedia workload, which was developed to facilitate our own studies on architectural support for multimedia. Here we present a survey of existing multimedia benchmarking methods, a description of the Berkeley multimedia workload, as well as a full workload characterization. We also extract a set of computationally important multimedia kernels for future study.
6758603
Sector cache design and performance
The first commercially available CPU cache memory used a sector design, by which the cache consisted of sectors (address tags) and subsectors (or blocks, with valid bits). It rapidly became clear that superior performance could be obtained with the now familiar set-associative cache design. Because of changes in technology, the time has come to revisit the design of sector caches. Sector caches have the feature that large numbers of bytes can be controlled using relatively small numbers of tag bits, while not having to transfer very large blocks. This suggests the use of sector caches for multi-level cache designs. In such a design, the cache tags can be placed at a high level (e.g., on the processor chip) and the cache data array can be placed at a lower level (e.g., off-chip). We present a thorough analysis of the design and use of uniprocessor sector caches. We start by creating a standard workload and then through simulation derive miss ratios for a wide range of sector cache designs. Those miss ratios are transformed into design target miss ratios, which are intended to be representative of a wide range of workloads. The miss ratios are then used to estimate performance, using typical timings, for a variety of one-level and true-level cache designs.
11584462
The automatic improvement of locality in storage systems
Disk I/O is increasingly the performance bottleneck in computer systems despite rapidly increasing disk data transfer rates. In this article, we propose Automatic Locality-Improving Storage (ALIS), an introspective storage system that automatically reorganizes selected disk blocks based on the dynamic reference stream to increase effective storage performance. ALIS is based on the observations that sequential data fetch is far more efficient than random access, that improving seek distances produces only marginal performance improvements, and that the increasingly powerful processors and large memories in storage systems have ample capacity to reorganize the data layout and redirect the accesses so as to take advantage of rapid sequential data transfer. Using trace-driven simulation with a large set of real workloads, we demonstrate that ALIS considerably outperforms prior techniques, improving the average read performance by up to 50% for server workloads and by about 15% for personal computer workloads. We also show that the performance improvement persists as disk technology evolves. Since disk performance in practice is increasing by only about 8% per year, the benefit of ALIS may correspond to as much as several years of technological progress.
36713689
Performance Characterization of Optimizing Compilers
Optimizing compilers have become an essential component in achieving high levels of performance. Various simple and sophisticated optimizations are implemented at different stages of compilation to yield significant improvements, but little work has been done in characterizing the effectiveness of optimizers, or in understanding where most of this improvement comes from. We study the performance impact of optimization in the context of our methodology for CPU performance characterization based on the abstract machine model. The model considers all machines to be different implementations of the same high level language abstract machine; in previous research, the model has been used as a basis to analyze machine and benchmark performance. We show that our model can be extended to characterize the performance improvement provided by optimizers and to predict the run time of optimized programs, and measure the effectiveness of several compilers in implementing different optimization techniques. >
3191261
Multiprocessor memory organization and memory interference
ture of shared memory in a multiprocessor computer system is examined with particular attention to noninterleaved memory. Alternative memory organizations are compared and it is shown that a home memory organization, in which each processor is associated with one or more memories in which its address space is concentrated, is quite effective in reducing memory interference. Home memory organization is shown to be particularly suited to certain specialized computational problems as well as to possess advantages in terms of interference and reliability for general purpose computation. Results for interleaved memory are drawn from previous work and are used for comparison. Trace-driven simulations are used to verify the conclusions of the analysis.
14423694
Characteristics of I/O traffic in personal computer and server workloads
Understanding the characteristics of I/O traffic is increasingly important as the performance gap between the processor and disk-based storage continues to widen. Moreover, recent advances in technology, coupled with market demands, have led to new and exciting developments in storage systems, particularly network storage, storage utilities, and intelligent self-optimizing storage. In this paper, we empirically examine the physical I/O traffic of a wide range of server and personal computer (PC) workloads, focusing on how these workloads will be affected by the recent developments in storage systems. As part of our analysis, we compare our results with historical data and re-examine some rules of thumb (e.g., one bit of I/O per second for each instruction per second of processing power) that have been widely used for designing computer systems. We find that the I/O traffic is bursty and appears to exhibit self-similar characteristics. Our analysis also indicates that there is little cross-correlation between traffic volumes of server workloads, which suggests that aggregating these workloads will likely help to smooth out the traffic and enable more efficient utilization of resources. We discover that there is significant potential for harnessing "free" system resources to perform background tasks such as optimization of disk block layout. In general, we observe that the characteristics of the I/O traffic are relatively insensitive to the extent of upstream caching, and thus our results still apply, on a qualitative level, when the upstream cache is increased in size.
314094
Correcting errors without leaking partial information
This paper explores what kinds of information two parties must communicate in order to correct errors which occur in a shared secret string W. Any bits they communicate must leak a significant amount of information about W --- that is, from the adversary's point of view, the entropy of W will drop significantly. Nevertheless, we construct schemes with which Alice and Bob can prevent an adversary from learning any useful information about W. Specifically, if the entropy of W is sufficiently high, then there is no function f(W) which the adversary can learn from the error-correction information with significant probability.This leads to several new results: (a) the design of noise-tolerant "perfectly one-way" hash functions in the sense of Canetti et al. [7], which in turn leads to obfuscation of proximity queries for high entropy secrets W; (b) private fuzzy extractors [11], which allow one to extract uniformly random bits from noisy and nonuniform data W, while also insuring that no sensitive information about W is leaked; and (c) noise tolerance and stateless key re-use in the Bounded Storage Model, resolving the main open problem of Ding [10].The heart of our constructions is the design of strong randomness extractors with the property that the source W can be recovered from the extracted randomness and any string W' which is close to W.
14362355
Design diagnosis using Boolean satisfiability
Recent advances in Boolean satisfiability have made it an attractive engine for solving many digital VLSI design problems such as verification, model checking, optimization and test generation. Fault diagnosis and logic debugging have not been addressed by existing satisfiability-based solutions. This paper attempts to bridge this gap by proposing a satisfiability-based solution to these problems. The proposed formulation is intuitive and easy to implement. It shows that satisfiability captures significant problem characateristics and it offers different trade-offs. It also provides new opportunities for satisfiability-based diagnosis tools and diagnosis-specific satisfiability algorithms. Theory and experiments validate the claims and demonstrate its potential.
5542444
Efficient and Non-interactive Non-malleable Commitment
We present new constructions of non-malleable commitment schemes, in the public parameter model (where a trusted party makes parameters available to all parties), based on the discrete logarithm or RSA assumptions. The main features of our schemes are: they achieve near-optimal communication for arbitrarily-large messages and are noninteractive. Previous schemes either required (several rounds of) interaction or focused on achieving non-malleable commitment based on general assumptions and were thus efficient only when committing to a single bit. Although our main constructions are for the case of perfectly-hiding commitment, we also present a communication-efficient, noninteractive commitment scheme (based on general assumptions) that is perfectly binding.
5725147
Local search genetic algorithm for optimal design of reliable networks
This paper presents a genetic algorithm (GA) with specialized encoding, initialization, and local search operators to optimize the design of communication network topologies. This NP-hard problem is often highly constrained so that random initialization and standard genetic operators usually generate infeasible networks. Another complication is that the fitness function involves calculating the all-terminal reliability of the network, which is a computationally expensive calculation. Therefore, it is imperative that the search balances the need to thoroughly explore the boundary between feasible and infeasible networks, along with calculating fitness on only the most promising candidate networks. The algorithm results are compared to optimum results found by branch and bound and also to GA results without local search operators on a suite of 79 test problems. This strategy of employing bounds, simple heuristic checks, and problem-specific repair and local search operators can be used on other highly constrained combinatorial applications where numerous fitness calculations are prohibitive.
37361807
Robust Fuzzy Extractors and Authenticated Key Agreement from Close Secrets
Consider two parties holding correlated random variables W and W′, respectively, that are within distance t of each other in some metric space. These parties wish to agree on a uniformly distributed secret key R by sending a single message over an insecure channel controlled by an all-powerful adversary. We consider both the keyless case, where the parties share no additional secret information, and the keyed case, where the parties share a long-term secret SK that they can use to generate a sequence of session keys {Rj} using multiple pairs {(Wj, W′j)}. The former has applications to, e.g., biometric authentication, while the latter arises in, e.g., the bounded storage model with errors. 
 
Our results improve upon previous work in several respects: 
 
– The best previous solution for the keyless case with no errors (i.e., t=0) requires the min-entropy of W to exceed 2|W|/3. We show a solution when the min-entropy of W exceeds the minimal threshold |W|/2. 
 
– Previous solutions for the keyless case in the presence of errors (i.e., t>0) required random oracles. We give the first constructions (for certain metrics) in the standard model. 
 
– Previous solutions for the keyed case were stateful. We give the first stateless solution.