[x264-devel] PARSEC benchmark suite

[Christian Bienia]

Hi,

Congratulations, x264 was chosen to be a workload in the PARSEC benchmark 
suite. The suite is a joint-venture between Intel and Princeton University. 
The suite was officially released yesterday. The announcement is attached at 
the end of this email.

Our analysis of x264 on a simulated 8-way Chip-Multiprocessor might be of 
interest for this mailing list, too. You can find it in the technical report 
which we published with PARSEC.

Thank you very much for answering all the questions which I had while working 
on PARSEC.

- Chris

==========

The Princeton Application Repository for Shared-Memory Computers
(PARSEC) has been released. This is the first publicly available version
of PARSEC. It can be obtained from the following web site:

            http://parsec.cs.princeton.edu/


PARSEC is a benchmark suite for studies of Chip-Multiprocessors (CMPs).
Previous available benchmarks for multiprocessors have focused on
high-performance computing applications and used a limited number of
synchronization methods. PARSEC includes emerging applications in
recognition, mining and synthesis (RMS) as well as systems applications
which mimic large-scale multi-threaded commercial programs.


The following 12 workloads are part of PARSEC:

    * blackscholes - Option pricing
    * bodytrack - Body tracking of a person
    * canneal - Simulated cache-aware annealing
    * dedup - Next-generation compression
    * facesim - Simulation of a human face
    * ferret - Content similarity search server
    * fluidanimate - Fluid dynamics for animations
    * freqmine - Frequent itemset mining
    * streamcluster - Online clustering
    * swaptions - Pricing of swaptions
    * vips - Image processing
    * x264 - H.264 video encoding

We offer 7 different input sets for each program which vary in size and
computational requirements. The inputs are suitable for testing &
development, microarchitectural simulation and native execution.


A detailed description and characterization of the benchmark programs is
available in our technical report "The PARSEC Benchmark Suite:
Characterization and Architectural Implications". It can also be
obtained from the PARSEC web site. We will offer a tutorial on PARSEC at
the 35th International Symposium of Computer Architecture (ISCA) in
Beijing, 2008.

- The PARSEC Team