Renaissance 0.9 Released

May 06, 2019, author: Lubomír Bulej

We are pleased to announce the release of the Renaissance benchmark suite for the Java Virtual Machine. The suite is primarily focused on parallelism and concurrency, and provides workloads that exercise the modern parallel programming abstractions and primitives provided by the JVM and the Java Class Library. Through these workloads, the suite aims to aid in understanding of how modern applications and data processing frameworks use the concurrency features of the JVM, and to foster development of new optimizations that enable more efficient execution of such workloads.

The Renaissance benchmark suite is intended to provide workloads that are not available elsewhere, and thus complement the workloads found in the existing, commonly used benchmark suites for the JVM, such as DaCapo, ScalaBench, and SPECjvm2008, which we gratefully acknowledge. We have found a great deal of inspiration in these suites, and strive to match and, where possible, exceed, the level of quality and usability established by these suites.

We realize that keeping a benchmarking suite alive (so that it evolves along with the platform and applications) requires a tremendous amount of work. We therefore aim to make the Renaissance development process as open as possible, and invite the community to participate in the process. The code is open-source and the contribution mechanism is open. The suite will be regularly updated through minor releases, while new benchmarks will be introduced or retired in major releases.

Version 0.9 marks the first public open-source release of the Renaissance suite and is considered a major-release candidate with respect to the selection of workloads included in the suite. The initial selection is based on the upcoming PLDI’19 paper, which also provides additional details on motivation behind the suite as well as detailed analysis of individual benchmarks and initial performance results. We are currently stabilizing the internal design of the harness and its public APIs, and work on a number of features that need to be included in version 1.0, the first major release of the suite which should be ready in few weeks.

We welcome any comments and contributions.

Happy benchmarking!

All posts