ALTIS: Modernizing GPGPU Benchmarking
This provides a more relevant tool for researchers in GPGPU architecture and system software, though it is incremental as it builds upon previous suites like Rodinia and SHOC.
The authors tackled the outdated nature of existing GPGPU benchmark suites by introducing Altis, a modern benchmark suite designed for current GPU architectures and runtimes, which includes updated and new applications to better represent contemporary workloads like deep neural networks and graph analytics.
This paper presents Altis, a benchmark suite for modern GPGPU computing. Previous benchmark suites such as Rodinia and SHOC have served the research community well, but were developed years ago when hardware was more limited, software supported fewer features, and production hardware-accelerated workloads were scarce. Since that time, GPU compute density and memory capacity has grown exponentially, programmability features such as unified memory, demand paging, and HyperQ have matured, and new workloads such as deep neural networks (DNNs), graph analytics, and crypto-currencies have emerged in production environments, stressing the hardware and software in ways that previous benchmarks did not anticipate. Drawing inspiration from Rodinia and SHOC, Altis is a benchmark suite designed for modern GPU architectures and modern GPU runtimes, representing a diverse set of application domains. By adopting and extending applications from Rodinia and SHOC, adding new applications, and focusing on CUDA platforms, Altis better represents modern GPGPU workloads to enable support GPGPU research in both architecture and system software.