WORKLOAD CHARACTERIZATION USING THE CRAY HARDWARE PERFORMANCE MONITOR

This paper describes some preliminary results about a workload charact erization study at a national supercomputer center. This study is part of a larger project to develop an analytic methodology for the constr uction of a representative benchmark set. Our study reports on 292,254 user jobs during the period from June 1992 to July 1993 and represent s about one-half of the wall clock time available on the four-processo r GRAY Y-MP at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications dur ing this time. The performance statistics we gathered in some sense de fine the workload because of the large fraction of the available time that was recorded. These statistics will allow us to ''reverse enginee r'' a set of benchmarks that analytically represents the workload at t his site.