Vector vs. Superscalar/conventional Cache on SPEC95. Its possible that the vector computing [Joh78] would be a very good match to IRAM. SPEC 95 includes a set of integer programs in C and floating point programs in Fortran, and you would expect that some of the floating point programs would do very well on a Cray. I expect to have the SPEC95 CD this week. This project would run programs with and without vectorization, and report the results. Included in the paper would be comparison with some superscalar RISC machines on each program (whose results can probably be found via the Computer Architecture Home Page), so that we can see where vector works well and where it works poorly. I can probably get you an account on a Cray if you don't already have access to one. Since there are many SPEC95 programs, it probably makes sense just to do a subset, so several groups could take a crack at this. If time permits, it would be interesting to see why the results are good for vector vs. superscalar/cache. See if you can characterize which SPEC programs are a good match (e.g., tomcatv) versus a poor match (e.g., gcc) for IRAMs. (To my best knowledge, I've never seen SPEC ratings on Cray Research computers, so this would be a first.)
(Cedric Krumbein and Richard P. Martin)