ParVec: vectorizing the PARSEC benchmark suite
Energy efficiency has recently replaced performance as the main design goal for microprocessors across all market segments. Vectorization, parallelization, specialization and heterogeneity are the key approaches that both academia and industry embrace to make energy efficiency a reality. New architectural proposals are validated against real applications in order to ensure correctness and perform performance and energy evaluations. However, keeping up with architectural changes while maintaining similar workloads and algorithms (for comparative purposes) becomes a real challenge. If benchmarks are optimized for certain features and not for others, architects may end up overestimating the impact of certain techniques and underestimating others. The main contribution of this work is a detailed description and evaluation of ParVec, a vectorized version of the PARSEC benchmark suite (as a case study of a commonly used application set). ParVec can target SSE, AVX and NEON SIMD architectures by means of custom vectorization and math libraries. The performance and energy efficiency improvements from vectorization depend greatly on the fraction of code that can be vectorized. Vectorization-friendly benchmarks obtain up to 10\(\times \) energy improvements per thread. The ParVec benchmark suite is available for the research community to serve as a new baseline for evaluation of future computer systems.
vectorization benchmarking simd 68-02 computer science research exposition