A workload generation environment for trace-driven simulation of shared-bus multiprocessors

We describe an environment to produce traces representing significant workloads for a shared-bus shared-memory multiprocessor used as a general-purpose multitasking machine, where each processor can include multithread facilities. By means of an exclusively software approach, the environment produces traces that include both user and kernel references, starting from source traces containing only user references. The process scheduling and the virtual-to-physical address translation are simulated in detail, whereas a stochastic model is provided for the generation of the kernel reference stream. The paper includes a section describing the generation of three different workloads used to evaluate the performance of a shared-bus shared-memory multiprocessor.