Cache Replacement Policy

A. Setting Up multi2sim

1. Open terminal and navigate to the folder where you want to set it up.

We will call this folder 'root'.

2. Clone multi2sim.

Multi2sim is a simulator of CPUs and GPUs, used to test and validate new hardware designs before they are physically manufactured. By running a set of standard benchmarks on Multi2Sim, a computer architect can verify whether a proposed alternative design is correct, and what its relative performance is over existing designs. We will use this simulator to test the performance of replacement policies.

git clone https://github.com/Multi2Sim/multi2sim.git

3. Clone cache-replacement-policies.

The repository consists of code to implement FLRU and benchmarks for testing the performance.

git clone https://github.com/baleegh/cache-replacement-policy.git

4. Run setup script.

The setup script modifies few files to test out the FLRU implementation and builds (installs) the multi2sim simulator.

./cache-replacement-policy/setup.sh

Incase of a permission denied error, run chmod 777 cache-replacement-policy/setup.sh first then try again.

B. Testing replacement policies with PARSEC benchmarks

1. Navigate to the benchmark folder.

Assuming you are in the 'root' folder, to the benchmark folder of your choice.

cd cache-replacement-policy/m2s-bench-parsec-3.0/<benchmark>

We will proceed with vips as an example.

cd cache-replacement-policy/m2s-bench-parsec-3.0/vips

2. Test the multi2sim binary on a single benchmark.

You can play around with configurations specified in files mem-config, x86-config and benchmark.ini files or use the default settings. --max-time is an optional parameter but useful if testing for small number of instructions.

../../../multi2sim/bin/m2s --x86-sim detailed --mem-config mem-config --x86-config x86-config --max-time 60 --ctx-config benchmark.ini

The output will look something like this:

; Multi2Sim 5.0 - A Simulation Framework for CPU-GPU Heterogeneous Computing
; Please use command 'm2s --help' for a list of command-line options.
; Simulation alpha-numeric ID: yDSmQ


;
; Simulation Statistics Summary
;

[ General ]
RealTime = 63.39 [s]
SimEnd = MaxTime
SimTime = 524734.00 [ns]
Frequency = 1000 [MHz]
Cycles = 524735

[ x86 ]
RealTime = 63.35 [s]
Instructions = 2074784
InstructionsPerSecond = 32749
SimTime = 524735.00 [ns]
Frequency = 1000 [MHz]
Cycles = 524735
CyclesPerSecond = 8283
FastForwardInstructions = 0
CommittedInstructions = 955111
CommittedInstructionsPerCycle = 1.82
CommittedMicroInstructions = 1562093
CommittedMicroInstructionsPerCycle = 2.977
BranchPredictionAccuracy = 0.8754

3. Running multi2sim on all benchmarks.

Assuming you are in the 'root' folder navigate to the m2s-bench-parsec-3.0 folder.

cd cache-replacement-policy/m2s-bench-parsec-3.0/

Run the experiments using LRU (default).

./runs.sh

Outputs will be stored in cache-replacement-policy/m2s-bench-parsec-3.0/<benchmark>/output.txt

For FLRU baseline, modify source code to run FLRU:

cd ../../multi2sim/src/memory/

Change line 33 in Cache.cc to { "LRU", ReplacementFLRU }, then

make clean
cd ../
make

Navigate back to the m2s-bench-parsec-3.0 folder and run the experiments again for FLRU.

./runs-FLRU.sh

Outputs will be stored in cache-replacement-policy/m2s-bench-parsec-3.0/<benchmark>/output-FLRU.txt