Performance Prediction using Program Similarity

Modern computer applications are developed at a very fast rate and new features are being added to the current ones everyday. A computer architect is always looking for quicker ways to evaluate performance of the design on these applications in a relatively shorter time. Simulation is a very popular tool used in the early design phase of a microprocessor. But applications run for a long time and microprocessors are getting complex which leads to very high simulation times. With a reasonably quick workload characterization we should be able to predict performance of the new application on the system(s). This paper proposes two simple techniques to predict performance based on the similarity of the new application with already characterized benchmarks whose performance numbers are available. Each of these techniques is then used to show how speedup and cache miss-rates can be predicted for a given program.