15-740 Fall '97
Notes on Assignments

The following information is in reverse order of assignment, i.e., the most recent assignment appears firsrt.

Assignment 6

• Part I: Cilk programming Available in Postscript.
  • Note the following typographic error: Questions 4.2(e) and 4.2(f) refer to "part (a)". These should refer to "part (d)".
  • Instructions on installing CILK on your machine are available in Postscript.
  • If your program crashes with the error message stating that malloc failing to allocate memory (this happened to Bruce on cuff.link for 3 or more processors), try running the test program as
    testall -heap 512 -nproc 4
• Part II: Directory-based cache coherence. Available in Postscript.
  • Note that the fragment of the protocol described here extends the one presented in class (Nov. 24) by allowing a processor holding a shared block to get exclusive access.
• Part III: Protocol verification with SMV Available in Postscript.
  • The files for this part of the assignment are in the cache subdirectory.
  • Problem 1, behavior 3 should read as follows:
    "A cache gives up ownership of a block due to a write miss by another processor."
    [Note: The original notification of this correction stated it was for behavior 2. Behavior 2 should remain as in the original document].

Assignment 5

Assignment 4

For measuring memory system performance, it is useful to express performance in units of clock cycles per word transferred.

For measuring disk performance, it is important to measure ``wall'' time (i.e., the time you'd measure by looking at a clock on the wall), rather than user CPU time. Otherwise, you'll get unrealistically short timings, since CPU time doesn't count the time your process cannot proceed waiting for a disk access. A special version of the ftime package has been created for this. The files ftime.h and ftime.c in the assignment directory define a function fwtime to provide this timing information.

Assignment 3

You will want to copy the file csr.tar in the directory HOME740/asst/asst3 into your local directory and ``untar'' it using the command
tar xvf files.tar.

You will need to select a platform to tune your code for. For each of the following possibilities, an article is available giving an overview of the internal architecture. Each of these is available in both Postscript (.ps) and Adobe Acrobat (.pdf) form. Out of deference to their copyrights, there is no direct link to them from any WWW page. Instead you should retrieve them from the directory HOME740/platform.

• p6 Intel P6, the basis of the PentiumPro and the Pentium II.
• ppc604 PowerPC 604.
• 21164 Digital Alpha 21164
• r10000 MIPS R10000
• r5000 MIPS R5000
• ultrasparc SUN UltraSparc

Important Change. Announced on October 10. In the original assignment, you were asked to report your code performance for just one set of experimental parameters. Instead, report it for the following:

• 5 20X20 matrices with density 0.25 (as originally requested)
• 5 20X20 matrices with density 0.5
• 1 20X20 matrices with density 1.0

Assignment 2

• Adobe acrobat,
• Postscript. This file is huge (3.5MB), so make sure you have plenty of disk space.

Working executable version of the simulator are available as follows:

• For Unix machines, you can try out a working version of the simulator solve_tk in the directory HOME740public/sim/.
  • Installations have been made for many of the standard machine types on campus. You can tell if your machine is supported by attempting to execute the command ./solve_tk. If you get a message about a file not being found, then that indicates the code has not been compiled for your machine yet.
  • Try using one of the Andrew servers, e.g., sun4.andrew or hp.andrew.
  • If you use one of the servers, you'll need to enable that machine (the "client") to open an X window on your machine (the "server"). To do this, determine the name of the server (e.g., unix26.andrew.cmu.edu), and give the command to the console of your own machine:
    xhost unix26.andrew.cmu.edu
    You can test for X window problems by attempting to execute the command xterm on the remote machine.
  • If you really want the code to run on your machine, notify Randy.Bryant@cs.cmu.edu, giving the result of executing the command sys on your machine.
  Included in this directory are subdirectories containing tests cases:
  • demos containing the demonstration examples from the Feb. 20 class.
  • exc containing the demonstration examples for the Feb. 25 class on exception handing.
  • tests containing the demonstration examples for the Feb. 25 class on exception handing.

• For Macintosh's (PowerPC only), there is an executable version available as a Binhex'ed self-extracting archive. Included with this distribution are the demoX.O and excX.O code examples.

You will want to copy the file files.tar in the directory HOME740/asst/asst2 into your local directory and ``untar'' it using the command
tar xvf files.tar.

Getting the GUI version of the simulator running requires compiling and linking the Tcl/Tk code libraries. Try find a machine with these libraries installed. In one machine I tried, the libraries were installed in /usr/local/lib, but the files tk.h and tcl.h were nowhere to be found. So, I put copies of them in the class include directory. Here would be the proper incantation:
make mips_tk INC=-I/afs/cs.cmu.edu/academic/class/15740-f97/public/include

Note, however, that this works only if the installed libraries are the same version as the include files.

Assignment 1

The files you need for this assignment can be found in the directory /afs/cs.cmu.edu/academic/class/15740-F97/public/asst/asst1/.

The following document, retrieved from the MIPS WWW site. describes the MIPS instruction set. It describes 4 generations of the instruction set definition, labeled I through IV. For this course, we will stick with the original (MIPS I) version:

• Adobe acrobat
• Postscript

Note that, contrary to the directions in the course syllabus, we require only one written solution for each project group. Clearly indicate the names of all group members on this document.