This paper provides a systematic comparison of various characteristics of computationally-intensive workloads. Our analysis focuses on standard HPC benchmarks and representative applications. For the selected workloads we provide a wide range of characterizations based on instruction tracing and hardware counter measurements.

This work presents a general methodology for estimating the performance of an HPC workload when running on a future hardware architecture. Further, it demonstrates the methodology by estimating the performance of a significant scientific application -- the Gyrokinetic Toroidal Code (GTC) -- when executing on Sun's proposed next-generation petascale computer architecture.For GTC, we identify the important phases of the iteration and perform low-level analysis that includes instruction tracing and component simulations of processor and memory systems. Low-level analysis is complemented with scalability estimates based on modeling MPI, OpenMP and I/O activity in the code. The work's approach permits accurate end-to-end performance projections from the microarchitecture level to the petascale.