Christian Bienia will present his preFPO on Wednesday April 14 at 2PM in Room 402. The members of his committee are: Kai Li, advisor; J.P. Singh and David August, readers; Jen Rexford and Margaret Martonosi, nonreaders. Everyone is invited to attend his talk. His abstract follows below. ----------------------------------------- TITLE: Benchmarking Modern Multiprocessors ABSTRACT: Benchmarking has become one of the most important methods for quantitative performance evaluation of processor and computer system designs. Benchmarking of modern multiprocessors such as chip-multiprocessors is challenging because of their different application domain, scalability and parallelism requirements. In my thesis, I have developed a methodology to design effective benchmark suites and demonstrated its effectiveness by developing and deploying a benchmark suite for evaluating multiprocessors. More specifically, my thesis includes several contributions. First, the thesis shows that parallel program behavior has changed significantly over time and that new benchmark designs need to consider such changes. Second, the thesis quantitatively describes the requirements and characteristics of current multithreaded programs and the underlying technology trends that have shaped them. Third, the thesis presents a systematic approach to scale and select benchmark inputs with the goal of optimizing benchmarking accuracy subject to constrained execution or simulation time. Finally, the thesis describes how I developed a parallel benchmark suite called PARSEC for evaluating modern shared-memory multiprocessors. Since its initial release, PARSEC has been adopted by most architecture groups in both research and industry.