Bliss Jumpstart Guide

   This short guide is designed give you a jumpstart on working with the Bliss simulator.  Please check this webpage as the course continues for updates on Bliss.

Related Links:
   Bliss website
   Bliss Hacking Guide
   Bliss Installation Guide

   The Bliss simulator is intended for use on Linux x86 systems.  If you plan to use Bliss on your home system, then please refer to the Bliss installation guide for instruction.  Otherwise, you will most likely be using Bliss on one of the instructional machines: ceylon.cs.washington.edu, fiji.cs.washington.edu, sumatra.cs.washington.edu, and tahiti.cs.washington.edu.  This guide assumes that you have already installed the Alpha-Linux cross-compiler, but not Bliss (this is true for the instructional machines).

   First, download Bliss and the SPEC 2000 benchmark that you will be using for assignment 2; these files are available here, or as ~evan/assign2_files.tgz on any of the instructional machines.  Place this .tgz file in the directory you intend to work in, then extract the files:

tar -xzvf assign2_files.tgz

This will unpack the 3 files: The (tarred and gzipped) Bliss source tree (Bliss.tgz), the SPEC benchmark (perlbmk_base.oct6a), and the input file for the benchmark (recurse.t).

   Next, build Bliss:

tar -xzvf Bliss.tgz
cd Bliss
make

This creates the simulator binary executable: Bliss/bin/sim4 
You'll want to use the Bliss config file Bliss/Configurations/standard4wide.cfg to control the runtime parameters (such as number of instructions to execute) of the simulator.  You can now run the benchmark with the simulator using the following command line:

./Bliss/bin/sim4 -Source:standard4wide.cfg perlbmk_base.oct6a recurse.t

On finishing, the simulator will place a stat.log file in the Bliss directory, this file contains the statistics collected during the simulation.