We open-sourced a modern and multi-platform memory bandwidth and latency benchmarking tool designed to work without manual tuning: https://github.com/spareCores/sc-membench
Feature highlights:
- Comprehensive tests across read, write, copy, and latency (pointer chasing) workloads
- Multi-platform (e.g. evaluated on multiple x86 and arm64 machines), portable (e.g. tested on BSD), and easy to run via Docker
- Efficient multi-threaded measurements via OpenMP
- Optimal thread placement and memory allocation for NUMA systems
- Adaptive test sizes based on CPU cache amounts
- Automatically handles Transparent Huge Pages
Disclaimer: Yes, we used LLMs for both coding and documentation updates, but we carefully validated the results against existing tools and their shortcomings. The results look super promising so far, and we already got some encouraging early feedback from our direct network, so it's time to ask for scrutiny from the wider community /o\
Motivation: We previously benchmarked 3,000+ cloud server types using bw_mem from LMbench, but the results were not always consistent with the detected L1/L2/L3 cache sizes. Debugging identified both cache detection issues (mostly relying on lscpu, investigating lstopo now), and limitations of bw_mem as well, e.g. unexpected slowdowns on servers with 100+ vCPUs. See more details in the "Comparison with lmbench" section of the README.
Why does your feedback matter? We plan to run this across ~5,000 cloud server types of 7 vendors, so I'd highly appreciate your feedback on methodology, implementation correctness, example results, and any missing cases before burning through a lot of precious cloud credits :)
The results will also be published under open-source licenses, just like all other data we collect at Spare Cores (including a bunch of other benchmark results).
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