SPLASH 2 Benchmarks

This is an unofficial version of the original SPLASH2 [1] benchmarks modified to work on modern systems and tool chains. Please note that this is SPLASH distribution is not made by the original authors of SPLASH. However, we strive to only make minimal changes to the applications and benchmarks to enable them to build and run on modern systems without affecting their overall behavior.

Warning: This is work in progress! Some benchmarks do not work reliably on 64-bit machines since they make assumptions that are illegal according to new C standards. For example, long, int, and pointers are sometimes considered to be of the same length. It is our long-term goal to fix-up such bugs to make the benchmarks usable on 64-bit machines.

ANL Macros

This SPLASH distribution contains two sets of parallelization macros. These macros are known as the "ANL macros" since originated from Argonne National Laboratories.

c.m4.null

These are the default ANL macros distributed with SPLASH2. They do not provide any support for parallelization and can be used to generate binaries for single-threaded reference runs.

c.m4.posix

These macros implement support for the standard POSIX threading API. They are used by default when building this modified version of SPLASH2.

Despite support for barriers in recent POSIX standard, these ANL macros provide their own implementation using locks and conditional variables. There are two reasons for this design decision: First, this maintains backwards compatibility with the old ANL macros which only specify the number of threads waiting on barrier when entering the barrier. POSIX requires this to be known when instantiating the barrier. Second, POSIX barriers are optional and not supported on some systems (e.g., MacOS X).

Build System

All benchmarks are built from a central makefile in the codes directory. Individual benchmarks can be built by specifying the target binary's name relative to the build directory (e.g., make apps/fmm/fmm) or by using one of the target/group specific build targets (see the makefile).

Build parameters should normally be specified in the global makefile. The default parameters have are known to work on gcc on Linux, your system might require some tweaking. See the CFLAGS/LDFLAGS/LIBS variables in the makefile. Additionally, the compiler flags of individual benchmarks can be manipulated in the main makefile using benchmark-specific variables (e.g., LU_CFLAGS). For details, see the Rules.mk file in the application's source directory.

Bibliography