Steps followed:
- Identification of measurements' method : Hardware Counters
- Identification of processors to work on. Candidates : Ultra Sparc I,
Alpha 21064, Alpha 21164, Pentium Pro. Chosen : Alpha 21064 and Pentium
Pro.
- Collection of information on using the Alpha 21064 and Pentium Pro
hardware counters.
- Collection of helpful/related publications (papers, books, manuals).
- Set up an Alpha 21064 (speeding.cs) and a Pentium Pro (hiss.cs)
machine to use for the measurements (some further tuning may be
necessary).
- Identification of benchmark programs used for measurements :
SPEC95, iosort and mpeg_encode.
- Development and testing measurement tools, device drivers and scripts.
- Development of execution time model for the two processors.
- Set up benchmarks on the two machines.
- Run benchmarks and collected measurements. Events both in user and
kernel mode were measured. Number of page faults, under restricted memory
use, for the sorting benchmark with an large input database measured.
- Calculate/plot/examine execution the speedup of IRAM implementations
as parameters vary (logic/DRAM speed in DRAM process, cost of
off-chip access).
- Compare the IRAM implementations of the two designs and the Alpha IRAM
to the original Pentium Pro.
- Measure kernel and user speedup separately for sort to examine how
IRAM affects kernel.
- Split sort into 3 phases (read, sort, write), and examine the speedup of
three phase separately, and examine which phase will benefit from IRAM
most..
- Wrote poster.
- Wrote paper
- Wrote presentation slides for cs262.
Future Work
Christoforos E. Kozyrakis & Helen Wang: Last Update 11/10/96