CPSC 330 - Fall 2009
Project 1 - Benchmark Analysis

Paper due on Wednesday, September 9

You should prepare a 5-page analysis report on the TPC-C benchmark.

You may work individually or in teams of two.  The report must be
written totally by yourself or by your team, but you may discuss
the project requirements and the particular benchmark with anyone
in class.

Model your paper after the Alan Weiss paper, "Dhrystone Benchmark:
History, Analysis, 'Scores', and Recommendations," available on-line
as http://www.johnloomis.org/NiosII/dhrystone/ECLDhrystoneWhitePaper.pdf

Following the example of Weiss, your paper should have these sections:

  * history of the TPC-C benchmark

  * technical characteristics of the benchmark - identify strengths
      and/or weaknesses of each characteristic

  * benchmark scores - examples of recent use of the benchmark

  * brief summary of the run rules for the benchmark

  * how to win at the benchmark the easy way - any known cheats,
      shortcuts, and/or targeted compiler optimizations (e.g., look
      for opinions/analyses like Mark Whitehorn, "Oracle 'cheated' in
      TPC benchmarks; Denies wrong doing," The Register, Nov. 12, 2007,
      http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/11/12/oracle_tpc_benchmarks/)

  * conclusions - is this benchmark reliable and representative?

  * references - bibliographic citations

Please use section titles to delimit the sections.  The titles do
not have to be match verbatim the section descriptions above.

Your audience should be other junior-level computer science students.

If you cut and paste a table or a figure from the web or other source,
be sure to cite the source both in the caption and in the references
section.  Please see the examples of other source citations as expected
to be found in a CS paper in /home/mark/example_citations.pdf.