Time and Location: 4/29/2020, Wed., 4 p.m., Online seminar

Speaker: Mr. Brody Williams

Title: CircusTent: A Benchmark Suite for Atomic Memory Operations

Abstract: A paradigm shift is currently taking place in the field of computer architecture. Consistent improvements to processor frequencies, relied upon in the past to drive the augmentation of system scalability, have stalled. As such, it is widely believed that future systems, wherein the design of hardware and software are more closely coupled, will need to leverage an increased degree of heterogeneity in order to realize further improvements. Parallel processing and corresponding programming models, already ubiquitous to high performance computing, will play a crucial role in these systems. Consequently, it is critically important to understand the interaction between these components. However, the behavior of atomic operations and associated synchronization primitives, which already represent a bottleneck in current systems, is difficult to quantify. Therefore, in this work, we introduce CircusTent, an open source, modular, and natively extensible benchmark suite for shared and distributed memory systems that is designed to measure the performance of a target architecture’s memory subsystem with respect to atomic operations. Herein, we first detail the design of CircusTent, which includes eight different kernels designed to replicate common atomic memory access patterns using two atomic primitives. We then demonstrate the capabilities of CircusTent through an evaluation of fourteen different platforms using our OpenMP benchmark implementation. In short, we believe CircusTent will prove to be an invaluable tool for the design and prototyping of emerging architectures.