Benchmarks and performance analysis of decimal floating-point applications

Abstract

The IEEE P754 draft standard for floating-point arithmetic provides specifications for decimal floating-point (DFP) formats and operations. Based on this standard, many developers will provide support for DFP calculations. We present a benchmark suite for DFP applications and use this suite to evaluate the performance of hardware and software DFP solutions. Our benchmarks include banking, commerce, risk-management, tax, and telephone billing applications organized into a suite of five macro benchmarks. In addition to developing our own applications, we leverage open-source projects and academic financial analysis applications. The benchmarks are modular, making them easy to adapt for different DFP solutions. We use the benchmarks to evaluate the performance of the decNumber DFP library and an extended version of the SimpleScalar PISA architecture with hardware and instruction set support for DFP operations. Our analysis shows that providing processor support for high-speed DFP operations significantly improves the performance of DFP applications.