  Adding new hardware features to a cloud computing server requires testing
both the functionalities and the performance of the new hardware mechanisms.
However, commonly used cloud computing server workloads are not
well-represented by the SPEC integer and floating-point benchmark and Parsec
suites typically used by the computer architecture community. Existing cloud
benchmark suites for scale-out or scale-up computing are not representative of
the most common cloud usage, and are very difficult to run on a cycle-accurate
simulator that can accurately model new hardware, like gem5. In this paper, we
present PALMScloud, a suite of cloud computing benchmarks for performance
evaluation of cloud servers, that is ready to run on the gem5 cycle-accurate
simulator. We demonstrate how our cloud computing benchmarks are used in
evaluating the cache performance of a new secure cache called Newcache as a
case study. We hope that these cloud benchmarks, ready to run on a dual-machine
gem5 simulator or on real machines, can be useful to other researchers
interested in improving hardware micro-architecture and cloud server
performance.
