McSimA+ [1] models x86-based asymmetric manycore microarchitectures for both core and uncore subsystems, including a full spectrum of asymmetric cores from single-threaded to multithreaded and from in- order to out-of-order, sophisticated cache hierarchies, coherence hardware, on-chip interconnects, memory controllers, and main memory. McSimA+ was once called McSim, when Jung Ho Ahn started to develop the simulator at HP Labs. Please contact Jung Ho Ahn (gajh@snu.ac.kr) for technical questions.

McSimA+ utilizes the user-level pthread library by Pan et al. [2], which is implemented on top of Pin. McSimA+ requires Pin, a dynamic instrumentation tool, so download Pin at http://www.pintool.org. As of now, McSimA+ is developed and tested in the Linux environment.

1. Download Pin at http://www.pintool.org and unzip it. (it was tested with pin 2.14)
2. Download McSimA+ and unzip it. Now we assume that

• McSimA+ is located at: ${MCSIM_PARENT_DIR}
• Pin is located at: ${PIN_HOME}

3. Compile McSimA+ by

   $ cd ${MCSIM_PARENT_DIR}
   $ make INCS=-I${MCSIM_PARENT_DIR}/pin/extras/xed2-intel64/include -j 8

• McSimA+ needs snappy compression library from Google.

  • http://code.google.com/p/snappy/
  • please install and setup proper environmental variables such as

  $ export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/usr/local/lib:$LD_LIBRARY_PATH

• The summary is as follow:

  $ cd ${MCSIM_PARENT_DIR}/McSim
  $ make INCS=-I${PIN_HOME}/extras/xed2-intel64/include -j8
  # comment: you should have snappy installed and it is assumed in /usr/local/lib
  $ export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/usr/local/lib:$LD_LIBRARY_PATH

4. Compile Pthread

   $ cd ${MCSIM_PARENT_DIR}/Pthread
   $ make TOOLS_DIR=${MCSIM_PARENT_DIR}/pin/source/tools -j 8

5. Compile a test program 'stream'

   $ cd ${MCSIM_PARENT_DIR}/McSim/stream
   $ make

6. Summary

   All environtment variables are set in setup_env file and compilation variables declared in Makefiles, can simply run:

   $ git clone https://github.tamu.edu/jyhuang/active-routing.git
   $ cd active-routing
   $ source setup_env
   $ cd McSim && make -j8 && cd ..
   $ cd Pthread && make -j8 && cd ..

Turn off ASLR. ASLR makes memory allocators return different virtual address per program run.

• how to turn it off depends on Linux distribution.

  • In RHEL/Ubuntu:

    $ sudo echo 0 > /proc/sys/kernel/randomize_va_space

  • See below if do not have sudo privilege to execute the command to turn off ASLR

1. Test run

   $ export PIN=${PIN_HOME}/intel64/bin/pinbin
   $ export PINTOOL=${MCSIM_PARENT_DIR}/Pthread/mypthreadtool
   $ export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/usr/local/lib:$LD_LIBRARY_PATH	# comment: for snappy
   $ export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=${PIN_HOME}/intel64/lib-ext:$LD_LIBRARY_PATH	# comment: for dwarf
   $ cd ${MCSIM_PARENT_DIR}/McSim
   $ ./mcsim -mdfile ../Apps/md/md-o3-closed.py -runfile ../Apps/list/run-test.py

2. Test stream

   $ export PATH=$PATH:${MCSIM_PARENT_DIR}/McSim/stream/:
   $ cd ${MCSIM_PARENT_DIR}/McSim
   $ ./mcsim -mdfile ../Apps/md/md-o3-closed.py -runfile ../Apps/list/run-stream.py

3. When do not have sudo privilege to turn off ASLR for the system

• Turn off ASLR when launching McSimA+ simulation

  $ setarch uname -m -R ./mcsim -mdfile ../Apps/md/md-o3-closed.py -runfile ../Apps/list/run-test.py

  ​

1. Compile tracegen

   $ cd ${MCSIM_PARENT_DIR}/TraceGen
   $ make TOOLS_DIR=${MCSIM_PARENT_DIR}/pin/source/tools -j 8

2. Run tracegen

   $ ${MCSIM_PARENT_DIR}/pin/intel64/bin/pinbin -t ${MCSIM_PARENT_DIR}/TraceGen/tracegen -prefix prefix_name -slice_size size point1 point2 ... -- exectuable to extract traces

[1] J. Ahn, S. Li, S. O and N. P. Jouppi, McSimA+: "A Manycore Simulator with Application-level+ Simulation and Detailed Microarchitecture Modeling", in Proceedings of the IEEE International Symposium on Performance Analysis of Systems and Software (ISPASS), Austin, TX, USA, April 2013.

[2] H. Pan, K. Asanovic, R. Cohn and C. K. Luk, "Controlling Program Execution through Binary Instrumentation", Computer Architecture News, vol.33, no.5, 2005.