Princeton Application Repository for Shared-Memory Computers (PARSEC) is a benchmark suite composed of multi-threaded emerging workloads that is used to evaluate and develop next-generation chip-multiprocessors. It was collaboratively created by

Intel Intel Corporation is an American multinational corporation and technology company headquartered in Santa Clara, California, Santa Clara, California. It is the world's largest semiconductor chip manufacturer by revenue, and is one of the devel ...

and

Princeton University Princeton University is a private research university in Princeton, New Jersey. Founded in 1746 in Elizabeth as the College of New Jersey, Princeton is the fourth-oldest institution of higher education in the United States and one of the n ...

to drive research efforts on future computer systems. Since its inception the benchmark suite has become a community project that is continued to be improved by a broad range of research institutions. PARSEC is freely available and is used for both academic and non-academic research.

Background

The introduction of chip-multiprocessors required computer manufacturers to rewrite software for the first time to take advantage of parallel processing capabilities, including rewriting existing systems for testing and development. At that time parallel software only existed in very specialized areas. However, before chip-multiprocessors became commonly available software developers were not willing to rewrite any mainstream programs, which means hardware manufacturers did not have access to any programs for test and development purposes that represented the expected real-world program behavior accurately. This posed a hen-and-egg problem that motivated a new type of benchmark suite with parallel programs that could take full advantage of chip-multiprocessors. PARSEC was created to break this circular dependency. It was designed to fulfill the following five objectives: # Focuses on multithreaded applications # Includes emerging workloads # Has a diverse selection of programs # Workloads employ state-of-art techniques # The suite supports research Traditional benchmarks that were publicly available before PARSEC were generally limited in their scope of included application domains or typically only available in an unparallelized, serial version. Parallel programs were only prevalent in the domain of

High-Performance Computing High-performance computing (HPC) uses supercomputers and computer clusters to solve advanced computation problems. Overview HPC integrates systems administration (including network and security knowledge) and parallel programming into a multi ...

and on a much smaller scale in business environments. Chip-multiprocessors however were expected to be heavily used in all areas of computing such as with parallelized consumer applications.

Workloads

The PARSEC Benchmark Suite is available in version 2.1, which includes the following workloads: * Blackscholes * Bodytrack * Canneal * Dedup * Facesim * Ferret * Fluidanimate * Freqmine * Raytrace * Streamcluster * Swaptions * Vips * X264

References

{{Reflist

External links

The PARSEC Benchmark Suite

The PARSEC Wiki
Benchmarks (computing) Evaluation of computers