[Gems-users] Running Ruby for fixed amount of time or Opal workloads

[Gene Kishinevsky <genek@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi all,

We've made some changes to the cache hierarchy and now want to test our 
design to see if we've improved cache performance. So far we've only 
been running Simics with Ruby loaded. The problem we're having is 
stopping the simulation right after the benchmark runs finish. If we 
don't catch this moment then the OS threads keep running and polluting 
the Ruby stats and it becomes hard to see if any progress has been made 
by the time we get back to the machine to check the results.
Is it possible to run Simics with Ruby for a fixed amount of time steps?

Alternatively, I looked into using Opal, and the gen-scripts seem really 
nice, but I'm not sure how to set up our workloads. We have a Simics 
checkpoint saved with all of our data, and we have a script on the 
simulated system that runs 4 spec benchmarks at the same time. So far 
I've been loading Ruby, then running simulation and manually starting 
the benchmarks in terminal of simulated system. How would I go about 
setting up the workload to use this checkpoint and then execute the 
necessary command in the terminal of the simulated system (to start 
executing benchmarks)?
Thank a lot for any tips. They are very much appreciated.

-Gene