ALTIS: Modernizing GPGPU Benchmarking

TL;DR

Altis is a new GPGPU benchmark suite designed to reflect modern hardware features and workloads, enabling more relevant research in GPU architecture and system software.

Contribution

It introduces a comprehensive benchmark suite tailored for current GPU architectures, extending previous benchmarks with new applications and modern workload representations.

Findings

Better represents modern GPGPU workloads

Supports research in architecture and system software

Includes diverse application domains

Abstract

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.