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

[Kevin Moore <kmoore@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Gene,
	I think what you need is to use simics' "magic" instructions in your 
benchmarks to stop simulation at just the right time.  Simics defines a 
special no-op instruction to be "magic" for each target architecture 
(e.g., sethi g0 on sparc).  One particular magic call causes a break in 
the simulation, which can be very useful for setting up checkpoints.  
See the simics documentation for more details on magic calls.
	First, you'll probably want to take a checkpoint where all of your 
benchmark threads are running and through their initialization phase.  
That way, you'll only need to run ruby on the phase of the benchmark 
that's interesting to you.  To do that, put a magic break in the 
benchmark code and recompile.  Then, in simics, if you enable magic 
calls (magic-break-enable) the simulation will stop when the magic call 
is executed and you can take a checkpoint of the system at that point.  
You'll probably also want to insert a magic call at the end of the 
interesting phase of your workload to break the simulation immediately. 
 Setting up a checkpoint like that is the first step to using the 
gen-scripts package, which will certainly save you a lot of time and 
effort.  Hope this helps,
Kevin


On Mar 15, 2006, at 4:37 PM, Gene Kishinevsky wrote:

> 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
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