ATOM: a system for building customized program analysis tools
PLDI '94 Proceedings of the ACM SIGPLAN 1994 conference on Programming language design and implementation
The measured performance of personal computer operating systems
ACM Transactions on Computer Systems (TOCS) - Special issue on operating system principles
Optimizing the data cache performance of a software MPEG-2 video decoder
MULTIMEDIA '97 Proceedings of the fifth ACM international conference on Multimedia
MediaBench: a tool for evaluating and synthesizing multimedia and communicatons systems
MICRO 30 Proceedings of the 30th annual ACM/IEEE international symposium on Microarchitecture
Memory system characterization of commercial workloads
Proceedings of the 25th annual international symposium on Computer architecture
Performance characterization of a Quad Pentium Pro SMP using OLTP workloads
Proceedings of the 25th annual international symposium on Computer architecture
Execution characteristics of desktop applications on Windows NT
Proceedings of the 25th annual international symposium on Computer architecture
An analysis of database workload performance on simultaneous multithreaded processors
Proceedings of the 25th annual international symposium on Computer architecture
Evaluating MMX technology using DSP and multimedia applications
MICRO 31 Proceedings of the 31st annual ACM/IEEE international symposium on Microarchitecture
Performance of database workloads on shared-memory systems with out-of-order processors
Proceedings of the eighth international conference on Architectural support for programming languages and operating systems
Performance of image and video processing with general-purpose processors and media ISA extensions
ISCA '99 Proceedings of the 26th annual international symposium on Computer architecture
Proceedings of the 27th annual international symposium on Computer architecture
Reconfigurable caches and their application to media processing
Proceedings of the 27th annual international symposium on Computer architecture
The Memory Performance of DSS Commercial Workloads in Shared-Memory Multiprocessors
HPCA '97 Proceedings of the 3rd IEEE Symposium on High-Performance Computer Architecture
Quantifying behavioral differences between multimedia and general-purpose workloads
Journal of Systems Architecture: the EUROMICRO Journal
The design, implementation, and evaluation of a compiler algorithm for CPU energy reduction
PLDI '03 Proceedings of the ACM SIGPLAN 2003 conference on Programming language design and implementation
An Analysis of Cache Performance of Multimedia Applications
IEEE Transactions on Computers
Proceedings of the 4th ACM international conference on Embedded software
DATE '03 Proceedings of the conference on Design, Automation and Test in Europe - Volume 1
Data cache management on EPIC architecture: optimizing memory access for image processing
MEDEA '03 Proceedings of the 2003 workshop on MEmory performance: DEaling with Applications , systems and architecture
DataSeries: an efficient, flexible data format for structured serial data
ACM SIGOPS Operating Systems Review
A framework for low energy data management in reconfigurable multi-context architectures
Journal of Systems Architecture: the EUROMICRO Journal
Branch behavior characterization for multimedia applications
ACSAC'06 Proceedings of the 11th Asia-Pacific conference on Advances in Computer Systems Architecture
Low-Power data cache architecture by address range reconfiguration for multimedia applications
ACSAC'06 Proceedings of the 11th Asia-Pacific conference on Advances in Computer Systems Architecture
Hi-index | 0.00 |
Multimedia applications are fast becoming one of the dominating workloads for modern computer systems. Since these applications normally have large data sets and little data-reuse, many researchers believe that they have poor memory behavior compared to traditional programs, and that current cache architectures cannot handle them well. It is therefore important to quantitatively characterize the memory behavior of these applications in order to provide insights for future design and research of memory systems. However, very few results on this topic have been published. This paper presents a comprehensive research on the memory requirements of a group of programs that are representative of multimedia applications. These programs include a subset of the popular MediaBench suite and several large multimedia programs running on the Linux, Windows NT and Tru UNIX operating systems. We performed extensive measurement and trace-driven simulation experiments. We then compared the memory utilization of these programs to that of SPECint95 applications. We found that multimedia applications actually have better memory behavior than SPECint95 programs. The high cache hit rates of multimedia applications can be contributed to the following three factors. Most multimedia applications apply block partitioning algorithms to the input data, and work on small blocks of data that easily fit into the cache. Secondly, within these blocks, there is significant data reuse as well as spatial locality. The third reason is that a large number of references generated by multimedia applications are to their internal data structures, which are relatively small and can also easily fit into reasonably-sized caches.