Trace Factory: generating workloads for trace-driven simulation of shared-bus multiprocessors

A major concern with high-performance general-purpose workstations is to speed up the execution of commands, uniprocess applications, and multiprocess applications with coarse- to medium-grain parallelism. The authors have developed a methodology and a set of tools to generate traces for the performance evaluation of shared-bus, shared-memory multiprocessor systems. Trace Factory produces traces representing significant real workloads consisting of a flexible set of commands and uniprocess and multiprocess user applications. The authors evaluate its accuracy and show how it can be used to evaluate and compare the performance of five coherence protocols.