Performance Cloning: A Technique for Disseminating Proprietary Applications as Benchmarks

Many embedded real world applications are intellectual property, and vendors hesitate to share these proprietary applications with computer architects and designers. This poses a serious problem for embedded microprocessor designers - how do they customize the design of their microprocessor to provide optimal performance for a class of target customer applications? In this paper, we explore a technique that can automatically extract key performance attributes of a real world application and clone them into a synthetic benchmark. The advantage of the synthetic benchmark clone is that it hides functional meaning of the code but exhibits similar performance characteristics as the target application. Unlike previously proposed workload synthesis techniques, we only model microarchitecture-independent performance attributes into the synthetic clone. By using a set of embedded benchmarks from the MediaBench and MiBench suites, we demonstrate that the performance and power consumption of the synthetic clone correlates well with that of the original application across a wide range of microarchitecture configurations