CS 252 Project Resources

Textbook:

J. L. Hennessy and D. A. Patterson, Computer Architecture: A Quantitative Approach, 2nd Edition, Morgan Kaufmann Publishing Co., Menlo Park, CA. 1996.

ISBN: 1558603298

Note that the 2nd edition is significantly different than the 1st edition, and it is not recommended that you attempt to use the 1st edition as a textbook for this course.

The errata sheet for the 2nd edition is available here. The first reader to report an error in the book and supply a correction that the authors incorporate in a future printing will be rewarded with a $1.00 bounty. To submit a bug, send a message to arc2bugs@mkp.com with the page number and line number of the error in the subject line. (Check the errata sheet first.) Typically these bugs are reviewed by the both publisher and the authors about once a year before checks are issued, so please be patient.

Here's one place to buy the book.

Additional Reading:

There will be no formal reader for this class. Required and recommended papers will be distributed in class; extras will be available at a place TBA.

One interesting resource that is now available (only to local Berkeley Hosts) is the ISCA 25-year retrospective in postscript and pdf. Several of the papers that we will be reading this term have retrospectives writen by the original authors that appar in this volume.

Search Utilities

Melvyl on the Web
Gladis
NCSTRL - National Computer Science Technical Reports Library
NCSTRL at UC Berkeley CS
The Collection of Computer Science Bibliographies
AltaVista
HotBot
Yahoo

Tools

Tools: a short story, by Remzi Arpaci, briefly describes pixie, pixstats, prof, dinero, qpt, CPROF, spim, Cacti, shade, and spixtools. Most of the specific directories and files mentioned are on the instructional machines.
Wisconsin Architectural Research Tool Set (WARTS) - including QPT, QPT2, CPROF, Tycho, dineroIII, and EEL
ATOM - A toolkit that can be used for tracing, and much more. Only runs on Alphas. Log in to either saidin.eecs (an instructional machine) or speeding.cs (on the same file system as the NOW machines)
EEL - A toolkit that can be used for tracing, and much more. Only runs on SPARCs.

class project

Etch - A tracing tool for Intel x86 platforms running either Win95, WinNT, or Linux. Courtesy of Harvard University and the University of Washington.
Instruction-Level Simulation And Tracing - This contains a huge list of simulators, emulators, and tracing tools, including an extensive bibliography as well as list of people to contact

Benchmarks

The Performance Database Server
Benchmarks FAQ - from the newsgroup comp.benchmarks
Benchmark Warehouse Center
SPEC benchmarks - benchmark suite from the Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation
bench - network benchmark program for IP networks that measures bulk transfer throughput and round trip delays using either TCP/IP or UDP/IP
lmbench - micro-benchmark suite that measures system latency and bandwidth of data movement among the processor and memory, network, file system, and disk
HBench-OS - an improved version of lmbench that fixes bugs, generates more statistically-accurate results, and includes support for the Pentium and Pentium Pro performance monitoring counters
ttcp - times transmission and reception of data between two systems using UDP and TCP protocols

Traces

Etch Traces - user level traces of Windows NT applications collected using Etch.
Etch Traces - another link.
BYU Traces
Monster Traces - Traces of 8 applications (run under Ultrix and Mach) collected with a hardware monitor on a DEC-MIPS workstation. Includes user and kernel activity. First presented in a paper which appeared in ISCA95. Courtesy of Richard Uhlig (thanks to Christoforos for getting them). More details forthcoming when these are actually available.
Patchwrx - Single-processor portions of traces, containing user and kernel references, from 2 spec benchmarks and a database, running under Windows NT on an Alpha. Courtesy of Dick Sites, from DEC. A few projects from last spring's IRAM class as well as a Spring 1996 CS 252 projects detail some caveats concerning the accuracy of these traces (and of Dick Sites' conclusions regarding "Caches Don't Work".)
New Mexico State Univ Trace Database
Internet Traffic Archive- contains 5 traces of TCP/ethernet traffic, 6 traces of requests received by specific web servers, 2 traces of web client requests (from some pool of clients), and a set of traceroute measurements. Traces can span hours or weeks and may occupy multiple megabytes uncompressed.

More info from Westley Weimer: "The web requests (the only ones I have examined in detail) tend to be long text files of tuples: (client-ip, time, document requested, size, etc) with the exact fields and format varying by trace. One trace even comes with a C interface for reading their records. "

Simulators

The SimpleScalar simulator is a very flexible simulation package that comes with a working version of GCC and precompiled versions of the SPEC 95 benchmark suite. SimpleScalar comes with several different simulators, each of which supports a different level of simulation: everything from timing-free but fast simulation (for debugging), to a full out-of-order simulator. The simulated processor is a variant of the MIPS architecture.

For a precompiled version that works on Linux X86, see Kubiatowicz's home page: ~kubitron/simplescalar.

CPU info

The CPU Info Center has a good summary of high-level info
MIPS does a very good job of providing on-line documentation
Intel's web page is generally full of marketing crap, but there's a neat Intel Secrets page, which is subtitled "What Intel Doesn't Want You To Know"
I have some hardcopy documentation on DEC Alpha microprocessors. I am willing to briefly loan them for making selective copies, or I can provide you with information as to how you can order (for free) your own copy.