Architectural Effects of Symmetric Multiprocessors on
TPC-C Commercial Workload

X. Du, X. Zhang, Y. Dong, and L. Zhang

Journal of Parallel and Distributed Computing, Vol. 61, 2001, pp. 609-640. 

Abstract 

Commercial transaction processing applications are an important workload
running on symmetric multiprocessor systems (SMPs). They
differ dramatically from scientific,
numeric-intensive, and engineering applications
because they are I/O bound, and contain
more system software activities.
Most SMP servers available in the market have been designed
and optimized for the scientific and engineering workload.
A major challenge of studying architectural
effects on the performance of a commercial
workload is the lack of easy access to large scale and complex database
engines running on a multiprocessor system
with powerful I/O facilities. Experiments involving
case studies have been shown to be highly time-consuming and expensive.
In this paper, we investigate the feasibility of using queuing network
models with support of simulation to study
the SMP architectural impacts on the performance of
commercial workloads.
We use the commercial benchmark TPC-C as
the workload. A bus-based SMP machine is
used as the target platform. Queueing network modeling is employed to
characterize
the TPC-C workload on the SMP.
The system components such as processors, memory, the memory
bus, I/O buses, and disks are modeled as service centers,
and their effects on performance
are analyzed. Simulations are conducted as well to collect the
workload-specific parameters (model parameterization),
and to verify the accuracy of the model.
Our studies find that among disk related parameters, the disk rotation latency
affects the performance of TPC-C most
significantly. Among I/O buses and number of
disks, the number of I/O buses has the deepest impact on performance.
This study also demonstrates that our modeling approach
is a feasible, cost-effective, and accurate way to
evaluate the performance of
a commercial workload on SMPs, and is complementary to the measurement-based
experimental approaches.

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