CPSC 330 - Spring 2013
Project 1 - Benchmark Analysis

Paper due on Wednesday, January 30

Grading Weights
  85% description of the benchmark
  10% bibliographic references
   5% section headers

You should prepare a 4- to 6-page analysis report on the TPC-C benchmark.

You may work individually or in teams of two.  The report must be written
totally by yourself or by your team, but you may discuss the project
requirements and the particular benchmark with anyone in class.

Your paper should have these sections:

  * introduction - including a brief history of the TPC-C benchmark

  * technical characteristics of TPC-C - identify major characteristics
      of the current version of the benchmark (requires a database,
      requires how much storage / how many disks, etc.)

  * use of TPC-C - examples of recent scores and their use in advertising,
      e.g., look for examples like these (but please cite and describe
      more recent ones instead):

      Dell, Inc., "Dell Is the First to Shatter the $1 Price/Performance
      Mark in the TPC-C Benchmark," Feb. 2006, http://www.dell.com/
      downloads/global/products/pedge/en/pedge_tpcc_pwrnt.pdf

      Hewlett-Packard, "HP Integrity Superdome sets #1 TPC-C performance
      benchmark record with HP-UX 11i v3 and Oracle 10g Enterprise
      Edition," Performance Brief, 2006, http://h20341.www2.hp.com/
      integrity/downloads/Superdome_TPCC_UX.pdf

  * rules for TPC-C - brief summary of the run rules and reporting rules
      for the benchmark

  * how to win at TPC-C - identify any known cheats, shortcuts, targeted
      compiler optimizations, unrealistic HW/SW pricing, unfair practices,
      etc., and describe whether and how TPC has responded; e.g., look for
      opinions/analyses like this (you can cite and describe this one):

      Chris Mellor, "Oracle accused of stifling HP TPC benchmark,"
      The Register, March 11, 2011, http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/
      03/11/oracle_allegedly_stifles_hp_oracle_tpc_benchmark/

  * conclusions - is this benchmark reliable and representative?

  * references - you must give full and specific bibliographic/URL
      citations for all references at the end of your paper

Please use section titles to delimit the sections.  The titles do
not have to be match verbatim the section descriptions above.

Your audience should be other junior- and senior-level computer science
students.

If you cut and paste a table or a figure from the web or other source,
be sure to cite the source both in the caption and in the references
section.