Dean Tullsen's 21164 Simulator

Overview

This simulator is an execution-driven, instruction-level simulator that simulates a superscalar architecture very close to the 21164. It runs on the Alphas and resides in /cse/www/education/courses/cse548/96w/tools/Tullsen. In that directory there is a README and a ROADMAP file. Basically, this program takes as input Alpha binaries, and produces simulation results. There is a sample of the simulation results in the sample_results file. The sample result output demonstrates what kind of quantities will be measured for you. It includes measurements in cycles of cache performance.

The simulator currently is set up to simulate the basic cache configuration on the Alpha 21164 (8K direct mapped 1st level Instruction and Data Cache, 96K 3-way set associative unified 2nd level cache). It also has a default of a Direct-mapped 1Mb 3rd level unified cache.

How to Build and Use the Simulator

  1. Copy the distribution to your directory. There is a tar file you can use called betasing.02.23.tar.gz.
  2. type: /uns/bin/mk which makes the mkfile in that directory. There will be some warnings, but ignore them.
  3. The simulator will be called betasing in that directory when the make finishes.
On our systems, the test programs must be linked with some special flags. The follow will compile a program test.c into test.out: 
  gcc -o test.out -static -Wl,-T -Wl,20000000 -Wl,-D -Wl,30000000 test.c
or
  cc -o test.out -non_shared -WL,-T -WL,20000000 -WL,-D -WL,30000000 test.c
Then follow the README file to simulate the program.

How to Modify the Simulator

The file specifying the cache heirarchy is cache.c. The basic structure of the program with regards to caches is that doiaccess or dodaccess is called whenever there is a memory reference (depending if it is for an instruction or data). In the beginning of cache.c there are #define's for the various cache parameters.

In that file, there are parameters specifying the times to access the cache heirarchy. These numbers are in units of clock cycles.

Note that the formula for the size of a cache is: 

   Line(block) size * Associativy * # of sets

Test Programs Available

There are a few test programs from SPEC available. The argfile will tell you what the programs are called and what files are needed to run. Here are the ones available in 96w/tools/Tullsen: