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Although many studies have been performed to determine the overall parallelism of various applications, little is known about how parallelism changes dynamically during program execution. In this paper, we present a methodology for measuring the dynamic parallelism of a general purpose workstation workload, as represented by a subset of the SPEC95 benchmark suite. We measure the range of parallelism encountered, the rate of major parallelism changes, and the regularity of these changes using a detailed model of an aggressive out-of-order speculative microprocessor. We find that parallelism can vary significantly and rapidly during application execution, and that varying the level of hardware support for exploiting application parallelism can have a non-uniform effect. We discuss how configurable processors oriented towards general purpose computing can potentially exploit these application characteristics.
Xu et al. (Thu,) studied this question.