STAMP Need Not Be Considered Harmful
Wenjia Ruan, Yujie Liu, Michael Spear · 2014
The STAMP benchmark suite has not seen any updates in 5 years. During that time, language-level support for Transactional Memory (TM) has arrived, in the form of a draft specification for C++ and compiler support. In addition, there is now commodity hardware support for TM. The properties of STAMP, however, do not always match with the emerging consensus on how hardware and software transactions should be programmed, leading to questions of relevance. We take the position that STAMP should not be considered harmful, and that the TM research community should embark upon a disciplined effort to produce up-to-date benchmarks, using STAMP as a starting point. To this end, we repair several flaws in STAMP and discuss their performance impact.