PiBench online

Abstract

The emergence of persistent memory (PM), such as Intel Optane DC Persistent Memory Modules (DCPMM), opened up many opportunities for building high-performance indexes directly on PM. However, the many PM indexes proposed by prior work had their evaluation based on PM emulation using DRAM and therefore it was not clear how they would perform on real PM hardware. Moreover, they typically used ad hoc, in-house benchmarks and did not collect PM-specific hardware metrics that are key performance indicators and are instrumental for users and developers to understand the performance behavior of PM indexes. These issues call for a systematic, fair and reproducible approach for evaluating PM indexes. This demonstration highlights the principles and lessons learned from our recent evaluation of PM indexes on real DCPMM and showcases PiBench, a unified benchmarking framework that enables fair and reproducible evaluation of PM indexes. In addition to common metrics, PiBench uniquely integrates monitoring tools to collect PM-specific hardware counters, allowing in-depth performance analysis. Our demonstration is enabled by PiBench Online, a new interactive system built on top of PiBench. Using PiBench Online, users can upload their own index implementations, run preset or customized workloads, and analyze results interactively, all through an easy-to-use web interface. PiBench is open-source and PiBench Online is deployed at https://pibench.org. We hope PiBench Online can promote fair comparison and reproducibility in database and systems communities.