  As architecture, systems, and data management communities pay greater
attention to innovative big data systems and architectures, the pressure of
benchmarking and evaluating these systems rises. Considering the broad use of
big data systems, big data benchmarks must include diversity of data and
workloads. Most of the state-of-the-art big data benchmarking efforts target
evaluating specific types of applications or system software stacks, and hence
they are not qualified for serving the purposes mentioned above. This paper
presents our joint research efforts on this issue with several industrial
partners. Our big data benchmark suite BigDataBench not only covers broad
application scenarios, but also includes diverse and representative data sets.
BigDataBench is publicly available from http://prof.ict.ac.cn/BigDataBench .
Also, we comprehensively characterize 19 big data workloads included in
BigDataBench with varying data inputs. On a typical state-of-practice
processor, Intel Xeon E5645, we have the following observations: First, in
comparison with the traditional benchmarks: including PARSEC, HPCC, and
SPECCPU, big data applications have very low operation intensity; Second, the
volume of data input has non-negligible impact on micro-architecture
characteristics, which may impose challenges for simulation-based big data
architecture research; Last but not least, corroborating the observations in
CloudSuite and DCBench (which use smaller data inputs), we find that the
numbers of L1 instruction cache misses per 1000 instructions of the big data
applications are higher than in the traditional benchmarks; also, we find that
L3 caches are effective for the big data applications, corroborating the
observation in DCBench.
