Milestone Report
http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~uhengart/15-740
Urs Hengartner and Rajesh Krishna Balan
{uhengart,rajesh}@cs.cmu.edu
Originally, we wanted to evaluate both a routing and a bridging application on the IXP1200. All the example applications delivered with the IXP1200 development environment support both functionalities. However, one crucial piece is missing: Because we are running our evaluation on the simulator, the simulator also has to generate the packets itself. However, the provided packet generator is targeted at IP packets and there are no examples on how to deal with layer-2 packets. Running our evaluation on the hardware and invoking the bridging code with real packets is not an option, because the hardware does not provide fine-grained performance information. Therefore, we are looking only at the routing application.
We have familiarized ourselves with the IXP1200, the development environment, and the simulator. We have also figured out how to run simulations both from within the development environment and from the command line. In addition, we picked one of the example applications and examined its functionality in more detail. Scripts for computing the average number of instructions in flight, IPC, and branch miss predictions have been written and first results have been gathered.
We have met the milestone in that we have written some scripts and got some results. We still have to figure out metrics for memory bandwidth.
Our main problem is documentation. There is a huge amount of manuals for the IXP1200, but finding the right information can be tricky in that very often it is hidden somewhere. In addition, the example applications are hardly documented. We know at a high level what they are supposed to do and the code is partially commented. However, information at the intermediate level such as what datastructures are used or the actual design of the application is missing.
| Date | Milestone |
| Nov 27 | Metrics and scripts for memory bandwidth |
| Dec 4 | Finish evaluation, write project report |
We have all the resources we need.