Workload characterization of bioinformatics applications

The exponential growth in the amount of genomic information has spurred growing interest in large scale analysis of genetic data. Bioinformatics applications represent the increasingly important workloads. However, very few results on the behavior of these applications running on the state-of-the-art microprocessor and systems have been published. This paper proposes a suite of widely used bioinformatics applications and studies the execution characteristics of these benchmarks on a representative architecture-the Intel Pentium 4. To understand the impacts and implications of bioinformatics workloads on the microprocessor designs, we contrast the characteristics of bioinformatics workloads and the widely used SPEC 2000 integer benchmarks.