The Extreme Benchmark Suite : measuring high-performance embedded systems

Abstract

The Extreme Benchmark Suite (XBS) is designed to support performance measurement of highly parallel "extreme" processors, many of which are designed to replace custom hardware implementations. XBS is designed to avoid many of the problems that occur when using existing benchmark suites with nonstandard and experimental architectures. In particular, XBS is intended to provide a fair comparison of a wide range of architectures, from general-purpose processors to hard-wired ASIC implementations. XBS has a clean modular structure to reduce porting effort, and is designed to be usable with slow cycle-accurate simulators. This work presents the motivation for the creation of XBS and describes in detail the XBS framework. Several benchmarks implemented with this framework are discussed, and these benchmarks are used to compare a standard platform, an experimental architecture, and custom hardware.