Savina - An Actor Benchmark Suite: Enabling Empirical Evaluation of Actor Libraries

Abstract

This paper introduces the Savina benchmark suite for actor-oriented programs. Our goal is to provide a standard benchmark suite that enables researchers and application developers to compare different actor implementations and identify those that deliver the best performance for a given use-case. The benchmarks in Savina are diverse, realistic, and represent compute (rather than I/O) intensive applications. They range from popular micro-benchmarks to classical concurrency problems to applications that demonstrate various styles of parallelism. Implementations of the benchmarks on various actor libraries are made publicly available through an open source release. This will allow other developers and researchers to compare the performance of their actor libraries on these common set of benchmarks.