CMPEN431 Programming Project-1

Description

CMPEN431 Programming Project-1
In this first programming project of CMPEN431, you will use SimpleScalar to perform experiments.
Specifically, you are going to explore the effects of branch prediction on performance. Please use
sim-outorder for each benchmark run, and we already have bzip2, equake, hmmer, mcf, milc and
sjeng totally 6 benchmarks ready for you to use. All the benchmarks can be found in
“/home/software/simplesim/ss-benchmark” You should copy these files to your own directory.
The sample command for your runs can be found in “SimpleScalar/SimpleScalar_Lab_Setup.pdf”
on canvas.”
Requirement:
You need to use three different branch prediction strategies below to run all 6 benchmarks. Each
benchmark needs to be run for 2,000,000 instructions.
M1-Predict taken/not taken: This is the baseline for this set of simulations. Make sure that you are
using both taken and not-taken as your branch prediction strategy for the baseline.
M2-Bimodal branch prediction: Next, just change the branch predictor to bimodal with a 2,048
BHT (the default) and a 512 set, 4 way associative BTB (also the default). You should manually add
all the configurations in the tmp.cfg file.
M3-Perfect branch prediction: To see how good (or bad) these two branch prediction schemes are,
experiment this time with a perfect branch prediction.
For your set of three experiments for each benchmark, you should write a report in tabulated form.
Show the total number of branches executed as well as sim_IPC for each benchmark. Here is the
sample table. You just need to fill up all the blanks in the tables.
Always take:
bzip2 equake hmmer mcf milc sjeng
sim_total_branches
sim_IPC
Always not-take:
bzip2 equake hmmer mcf milc sjeng
sim_total_branches
sim_IPC
Bimodal:
bzip2 equake hmmer mcf milc sjeng
sim_total_branches
sim_IPC
perfect:
bzip2 equake hmmer mcf milc sjeng
sim_total_branches
sim_IPC
Project policy
i) For this project, you may choose to pair up with another student (this is not a requirement;
if you want, you can do it alone).
ii) Each group should submit a single file(pdf) with four tables of described above. You also
need to submit the output file from SimpleScalar (totally 24 files, 4 files per benchmark).
iii) Please indicate the names and PSU IDs of the group members in your submission.
iv) This project is due Nov 17th 11:59pm.