I will provide office hour after each class. If you need more or alternative time, feel free to schedule by email.

Every assignment is an individual assignment unless otherwise mentioned. Students are not expected to see each other solutions to the assignments.

Project 1

Infrastructure: PIN and SPEC 2006

Tasks:

1. Install SPEC 2006, execute it, understand the runspec script.
2. Install PIN, execute a few examples. Understand how it works.
3. Use the available pintools to count the number of instructions of each SPEC program.
4. Create a new pintool and use it in, at least, 5 SPEC programs.

Report:

• Create a folder called project1 in your repository
• Due to 19/Sep, 10AM
• Report document. SBC Template. You can choose either English or Portuguese for your report. Maximum of 6 pages containing the count (item 3 above) and the description and result of your pintool. Filename: report.pdf
• Presentation Document. Create a file called presentation.pdf containing slides for a 5 minutes presentation of your project.
• CSV file. Include a file results.csv containing the results of the instruction count. This file should contain two columns where the first is the program name and the second is the instruction count. For programs that execute more than one time, include the execution number (1, 2, 3) after their names.
• Source code. Include your source code in the folder src. This folder should contain all code that you created/modified together with scripts to execute and a README.md file explaining dependencies. Your script could rely on environment variables for pre-requisites.

Project 2

Infrastructure: PIN, and 10 benchmarks

Task:

• Evaluate Virtual to Physical memory translation for 4KB and 4MB pages.
• Consider up to 512 entries TLB for instruction and data.
• Consider 3 or 4 levels page table.
• Look for benchmarks with large memory footprint.
• Create one toy benchmark to check your environment.

Report:

• Create a folder called project2 in your repository
• Due to 23/Oct (end of the day)
• Report document. SBC Template. You can choose either English or Portuguese for your report. Maximum of 6 pages containing the count (item 3 above) and the description and result of your pintool. Filename: report.pdf
• Presentation Document. Create a file called presentation.pdf containing slides for a 5 minutes presentation of your project.
• CSV file. Include a file results.csv containing your results. For each benchmark, include the following columns: benchmark name (nd input if necessary), total memory access for instructions, total TLB misses for instructions, total page table access for instructions, total memory access for data, total TLB misses for data, total page table access for data.
• Source code. Include your source code in the folder src. This folder should contain all code that you created/modified together with scripts to execute and a README.md file explaining dependencies. Your script could rely on environment variables for pre-requisites.

Project 3

Goal: Reproduce one item (graph, table, etc) of a pre-selected paper from the last three editions of the following conferences: ISCA, ASPLOS, MICRO, HPCA.

Tasks:

• Create a folder called project3 in your repository
• Every Friday, up to 21/Oct, include the reference to one paper that you preliminary inspected in a file called papers.txt
• When you feel that you have selected the desired paper, talk to me to reserve it and avoid conflicts. Insert the paper PDF in your repository as paper.pdf and create a short overview of it together with the specification of your task and how you plan to execute it in the following weeks. This presentation should be in a file called presentation1.pdf and you are expected to talk about it for 15 minutes in the classes of 31/Oct and 04/Nov.

Report:

• Create a folder called project3 in your repository
• Due to 17/Nov (end of the day)
• Report document. SBC Template. You can choose either English or Portuguese for your report. Maximum of 6 pages containing the count (item 3 above) and the description and result of your pintool. Filename: report.pdf
• Presentation Document. Create a file called presentation2.pdf containing slides for a up to 15 minutes presentation of your project.
• Source code. Include your source code in the folder src. This folder should contain all code that you created/modified together with scripts to execute and a README.md file explaining dependencies. Your script could rely on environment variables for pre-requisites.

Selected papers

• João Paulo Labegalini de Carvalho: Varun Agrawal, Abhiroop Dabral, Tapti Palit, Yongming Shen, and Michael Ferdman. 2015. Architectural Support for Dynamic Linking. In Proceedings of the Twentieth International Conference on Architectural Support for Programming Languages and Operating Systems (ASPLOS '15). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 691-702. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/2694344.2694392
• Gustavo Ciotto Pinton: R. Parihar and M. C. Huang, "Accelerating decoupled look-ahead via weak dependence removal: A metaheuristic approach," 2014 IEEE 20th International Symposium on High Performance Computer Architecture (HPCA), Orlando, FL, 2014, pp. 662-677.
• Ciro Ceissler: Shao, Yakun Sophia, et al. "Aladdin: A pre-rtl, power-performance accelerator simulator enabling large design space exploration of customized architectures." 2014 ACM/IEEE 41st International Symposium on Computer Architecture (ISCA). IEEE, 2014.
• Rafael Junio: FLUSH+RELOAD: A High Resolution, Low Noise, L3 Cache Side-Channel Attack. Usenix Security Simposium 2014.
• Lucas Prado Melo: Hilton, A. D., B. C. Lee, and Z. Huang. "Decoupling loads for nano-instruction set computers." Proceedings of The 43rd International Symposium on Computer Architecture. 2016.
• Paulo Henrique Junqueira Amorim: Tri M. Nguyen and David Wentzlaff. 2015. MORC: a manycore-oriented compressed cache. In Proceedings of the 48th International Symposium on Microarchitecture (MICRO-48).
• Uglaybe Fernandes: Albericio, Jorge, et al. "Wormhole: Wisely predicting multidimensional branches." Proceedings of the 47th Annual IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Microarchitecture. IEEE Computer Society, 2014.
• Alceu Emanuel Bissoto: Akanksha Jain, Calvin Lin. "Back to the Future: Leveraging Belady’s Algorithm for Improved Cache Replacement". Proceedings of The 43rd International Symposium on Computer Architecture (ISCA). 2016.
• Marcus de Assis Angeloni: S. Bucur, J. Kinder, and G. Candea - "Prototyping symbolic execution engines for interpreted languages". In Proceedings of the 19th International Conference on Architectural Support for Programming Languages and Operating Systems (ASPLOS '14). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 239-254.
• Rafael Soares: S. Girbal, G. Mouchard, A. Cohen, and O. Temam. DiST: A simple, reliable and scalable method to significantly reduce processor architecture simulation time. In Proceedings of the 2003 ACM SIGMETRICS International Conference on Measurement and Modeling of Computer Systems, pages 1–12, June 2003.
• Alfredo Salvarani: D. Gope and M. H. Lipasti, "Bias-Free Branch Predictor," 2014 47th Annual IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Microarchitecture, Cambridge, 2014, pp. 521-532.
• George Araújo: S. Khan, A. R. Alameldeen, C. Wilkerson, O. Mutluy and D. A. Jimenezz, "Improving cache performance using read-write partitioning," 2014 IEEE 20th International Symposium on High Performance Computer Architecture (HPCA), Orlando, FL, 2014, pp. 452-463.
• Paulo Henrique: Eric Rotenberg, Steve Bennett, and James E. Smith. 1996. Trace cache: a low latency approach to high bandwidth instruction fetching. In Proceedings of the 29th annual ACM/IEEE international symposium on Microarchitecture (MICRO 29). IEEE Computer Society, Washington, DC, USA, 24-35.
• Davi Castro: G. Aşılıoğlu, Z. Jin, M. Köksal, O. Javeri and S. Önder, "LaZy Superscalar," 2015 ACM/IEEE 42nd Annual International Symposium on Computer Architecture (ISCA), Portland, OR, 2015, pp. 260-271.
• Pedro Tadahiro: The Inner Most Loop Iteration counter: a new dimension in branch history - Andre Seznec (INRIA/IRISA), Joshua San Miguel (University of Toronto), Jorge Albericio (University of Toronto)

Project 4

Goal: Expand one activity of the project 3 paper.

Tasks:

• Create a folder called project4 in your repository
• You can explore more configurations, you can make any variation to the algorithm, you can choose other opportunities. You do not need to get better results. You can even work to better explain the oficial result.

Report:

• Create a folder called project4 in your repository
• Due to 12/Dec (end of the day)
• Report document. SBC Template. You can choose either English or Portuguese for your report. Maximum of 6 pages containing the count (item 3 above) and the description and result of your pintool. Filename: report.pdf
• Presentation Document. Create a file called presentation.pdf containing slides for a up to 15 minutes presentation of your project.
• Source code. Include your source code in the folder src. This folder should contain all code that you created/modified together with scripts to execute and a README.md file explaining dependencies. Your script could rely on environment variables for pre-requisites.