CommBench - Overview |
What workload does CommBench model?The main philosophy behind CommBench was to identify applications that can be used to model a workload for network processors. At this point in time, there is a wide variety of network processors ranging from data link level processors to application layer processing engines. Thus, it was important to capture a broad variety of applications, from simple header processing to more complex applications, like payload encryption. Particular significance was put on the computational kernel of an application, which corresponds to the part of the program contributes to the majority of instructions executed (i.e., the 'inner loop'). While it is clear that different network processor systems exhibit notable differences in how programs are started and initialized, it can also be expected that there is much overlap in how the computational kernel is processed. Thus, results that are obtained from benchmark runs on a given system can be extrapolated to architecturally similar systems even though there might be differences in components that do not affect the computational kernel. As with all benchmarks, care has to be taken in interpreting the obtained result. If you use CommBench, it is important that you understand for what it is useful and where its limits are: What can be done with it?
What are its limitations?
How to obtain CommBench?Contact the developers and we will provide you with details on the licensing process. |
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