Dear all, We are happy to announce that we will hold an interactive tutorial at ASPLOS in which you can learn about CloudSuite and the Flexus simulation infrastructure. More importantly, you will have the opportunity to learn how to correctly and rigorously evaluate server designs using real-world server software stacks in a practical way. The official call for participation appears below, and the registration is already open.
See you all in Salt Lake City! Regards, Djordje The emergence of cloud computing as a dominant computing platform highlights the need for practical and rigorous architectural evaluation of server systems. Such evaluation mandates the use of a variety of real-world server workloads, all of which are radically different from traditional desktop and scientific benchmarks. Unfortunately, deep and complex software stacks of both conventional (e.g., OLTP, DSS) and emerging scale-out (e.g., Media Streaming, Web Search) server workloads make the evaluation process even harder and slower, postponing the adoption of realistic server benchmarks within the architectural community. CloudSuite is an on-going effort towards a common architectural evaluation basis, aimed at providing an up-to-date suite of benchmarks that represent popular scale-out cloud applications commonly found in today's datacenters. The latest version, CloudSuite 2.0, comprises of eight scale-out applications that feature real-world server software stacks and datasets that can be used as realistic benchmarks for the scale-out applications class. These applications are data analytics, data caching, data serving, graph processing, media streaming, software testing, web search, and web serving. CloudSuite provides the means for throughput and quality of service (QoS) measurement for each benchmark. In this tutorial, we first introduce CloudSuite 2.0 and demonstrate how to run the benchmarks on real hardware. As evaluating server software stacks via full-system simulation is prohibitively slow, a need for statistical sampling emerges. A rigorous sampling methodology is of utmost importance, because improper sampling can lead to highly misleading results. Devising the right sampling methodology for server workloads is not trivial. For that reason, our tutorial covers the SMARTS sampling methodology, a widely applicable framework that enables fast cycle-accurate simulation of both conventional and emerging server workloads on various full-system architectural simulators. We demonstrate how the SMARTS methodology can be applied in today's simulators through a case study; we describe the complete simulation process using Flexus, a full-system multiprocessor simulator that leverages the statistical sampling methodology for fast, yet rigorous evaluation of CloudSuite 2.0 benchmarks. Our tutorial will take place on Sunday, March 2nd, in conjunction with ASPLOS 2014 in Salt Lake City. For further information on the tutorial, please visit our website at: http://parsa.epfl.ch/cloudsuite/asplos14-tutorial
