Helenos: A Realistic Benchmark for Distributed Transactional Memory

TL;DR

Helenos is a comprehensive benchmark designed to evaluate distributed transactional memory systems using a realistic Facebook inbox scenario based on Cassandra, addressing the limitations of existing benchmarks in distributed environments.

Contribution

The paper introduces Helenos, a new realistic and complex benchmark specifically tailored for distributed TM systems, filling a gap left by existing microbenchmark-based evaluations.

Findings

Helenos provides a more realistic assessment of distributed TM performance.

It captures the complexity of real-world distributed applications.

Helenos enables better comparison of distributed TM implementations.

Abstract

Transactional Memory (TM) is an approach to concurrency control that aims to make writing parallel programs both effective and simple. The approach is started in non-distributed multiprocessor systems, but is gaining popularity in distributed systems to synchronize tasks at large scales. Efficiency and scalability are often the key issues in TM research, so performance benchmarks are an important part of it. However, while standard TM benchmarks like the STAMP suite and STMBench7 are available and widely accepted, they do not translate well into distributed systems. Hence, the set of benchmarks usable with distributed TM systems is very limited, and must be padded with microbenchmarks, whose simplicity and artificial nature often makes them uninformative or misleading. Therefore, this paper introduces Helenos, a realistic, complex, and comprehensive distributed TM benchmark based on the problem of the Facebook inbox, an application of the Cassandra distributed store.