The design of COMPASS: an execution driven simulator for commercial applications running on shared memory multiprocessors

Although shared memory multiprocessors are becoming increasingly popular in the commercial market place, the applications used to evaluate such systems in both academia and industry are still predominantly technical applications such as the Stanford SPLASH2 benchmarks. The difficulty in using commercial parallel shared memory applications such as transaction processing, decision support and web server applications has been in simulating the operating systems functions that are heavily used by these applications. We describe the design of an execution driven simulation tool called COMPASS (COMmercial PArallel Shared memory Simulator). We have used COMPASS at IBM to study the behavior of decision support applications and are currently studying the behavior of transaction processing applications and web servers.