BigDataBench: A Scalable and Unified Big Data and AI Benchmark Suite

Several fundamental changes in technology indicate domain-specific hardware and software co-design is the only path left. In this context, architecture, system, data management, and machine learning communities pay greater attention to innovative big data and AI algorithms, architecture, and systems. Unfortunately, complexity, diversity, frequently-changed workloads, and rapid evolution of big data and AI systems raise great challenges. First, the traditional benchmarking methodology that creates a new benchmark or proxy for every possible workload is not scalable, or even impossible for Big Data and AI benchmarking. Second, it is prohibitively expensive to tailor the architecture to characteristics of one or more application or even a domain of applications. We consider each big data and AI workload as a pipeline of one or more classes of units of computation performed on different initial or intermediate data inputs, each class of which we call a data motif. On the basis of our previous work that identifies eight data motifs taking up most of the run time of a wide variety of big data and AI workloads, we propose a scalable benchmarking methodology that uses the combination of one or more data motifs---to represent diversity of big data and AI workloads. Following this methodology, we present a unified big data and AI benchmark suite---BigDataBench 4.0, publicly available from~\url{http://prof.ict.ac.cn/BigDataBench}. This unified benchmark suite sheds new light on domain-specific hardware and software co-design: tailoring the system and architecture to characteristics of the unified eight data motifs other than one or more application case by case. Also, for the first time, we comprehensively characterize the CPU pipeline efficiency using the benchmarks of seven workload types in BigDataBench 4.0.