Keynote: Proprietary Code to Non-Proprietary Benchmarks: Synthesis Techniques for Scalable Benchmarks

Prof. Lizy Kurian John B. N. Gafford Professor of Electrical Engineering, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering The University of Texas at Austin

Real world applications constitute intellectual property and simultaneous design of hardware and software is made very difficult due to the need for disclosing proprietary software to hardware designers. Consider a smart phone for which applications are developed by various third parties or a military embedded system, where the applications are developed in-house at the military while hardware is procured from standard vendors. Design of hardware that gives good performance and low power can be done if hardware designers had access to the software, so they can understand the features of the software and tune various hardware features to the software characteristics. While non-disclosure agreements and legal arrangements can be used to partially solve the problem, it will be much more convenient to have a mechanism to create proxies of proprietary benchmarks that have the performance (and power) characteristics of the source, but not the functionality.

In this talk, an automated synthetic benchmark generation methodology will be presented as an approach to disseminate proprietary real-world applications to non-proprietary benchmarks. The process of constructing synthetic proxies that approximately resemble the original proprietary application will be explained. Experiments with generating proxies for SPEC CPU 2006 and other applications will be presented.

Lizy Kurian John is B. N. Gafford Professor of Electrical Engineering at The University of Texas at Austin. She received her Ph. D in Computer Engineering from the Pennsylvania State University. She has been on the faculty of UT Austin since 1996. Her current research interests are in microprocessor design, performance evaluation and  workload characterization.  She has written 1 book on Digital System Design, and edited 4 books on performance evaluation and workload characterization. She is also author of 15 book chapters and several journal and conference publications. She has 3 patents to her credit and 3 are in progress. She was in the founding committees of the IEEE International Symposium on Workload characterization (IISWC) and ISPASS (International Symposium on Performance Analysis of Systems and Software). She has received several awards including the Texas Exes Teaching award, the UT Austin Engineering Foundation Faculty award , the Halliburton Young Faculty award and the NSF CAREER award. She is an IEEE Fellow.