October 9, 1999

Workload behavior studies are extremely important in guiding the design of computer architectures. Accurate characterization of application and operation system behavior leads to the design of improved architectures. This 1-day workshop will focus on quantitative characterization and analytical modeling of workloads from commercial and scientific computing. Analytical modeling of workloads is extremely difficult and warrants careful consideration, especially because it takes significant amounts of time to perform trace-driven or execution-driven simulations due to the increased complexity of the processor, memory subsystem and the workload domain. The quantitative characterization studies can lead to the creation and validation of analytical models that capture the essential features of systems and workloads, which can be very useful in efficient exploration of the design space and making early design tradeoffs.