Splash-4: Improving Scalability with Lock-Free Constructs

Abstract

Over the past three decades, the parallel applications of the Splash-2 benchmark suite have been instrumental in advancing multiprocessor research. Recently, the Splash-3 benchmarks eliminated performance bugs, data races, and improper synchronization that plagued Splash-2 benchmarks after the definition of the C memory model. In this work, we revisit the Splash-3 benchmarks and adapt them for contemporary architectures with atomic operations and lock-free constructs. With our changes, we improve the scalability of most benchmarks for up to 32 and 64 cores, showing an improvement of up to 9x in actual machines, and up to 5x in simulation, over the unmodified Splash-3 benchmarks. To denote the substantive nature of the improvements in the Splash-3 benchmarks and to re-introduce them in contemporary research, we refer to the new collection as Splash-4.