6.1 Source Programs

As mentioned earlier, we used both real and synthetic programs in our experiments. This section describes the real programs that were used.

We studied the following programs: rcc, gzip, gnuchess, ghostview, pico, and render. (See Table 6.1.)

 
Table 6.1: Real Programs Studied 

Lcc, gzip, gnuchess, and ghostview are all under the GNU General Public License. Pico is copyrighted by the University of Washington. Render was developed as a class project at Washington University.

The performance of each program is, of course, dependent on its input. The input for each program is as follows.

rcc

The input to rcc was the source file x86.c, which is lcc's code generation module for the Intel x86 architecture.

gzip

The input provided to gzip was a 206 Kbyte directory.

gnuchess

The chess program was set up to play against itself with a very shallow search depth.

ghostview

Ghostview was run with the file ``ghostview.ps'' specified on the command line. This 92 Kbyte Postscript file is a documentation file included with ghostview. Each of the 14 pages was viewed quickly before exiting the program.

pico

The editor was started without an input file. Text was entered for about a minute, the file was saved, and then the program was exited.

render

The input to the render program was a batch file which instructed the program to raytrace a very simple scene.