Evaluating workloads using comparative functional coverage

We introduce comparative functional coverage-a technique for comparing the coverage of multiple workloads-and the tool in which it was implemented, FoCuS. The need to compare workloads and the use of functional coverage as a technique to explore data are not new. However, the use of functional coverage for comparing workloads has not been addressed as a method that responds to this long unanswered need. We describe our work in augmenting a functional coverage tool so it can handle multiple data sources. We present the data and include an experiment that shows the usefulness of this method. © 2010 Springer-Verlag.