PARSEC

This document includes instructions on how to create an Ubuntu 18.04 disk-image with PARSEC benchmark installed. The disk-image will be compatible with the gem5 simulator.

This is how the src/parsec-tests/ directory will look like if all the artifacts are created correctly.

parsec/
  |___ gem5/                                   # gem5 folder
  |
  |___ disk-image/
  |      |___ shared/
  |      |___ parsec/
  |             |___ parsec-image/
  |             |      |___ parsec             # the disk image will be here
  |             |___ parsec.json               # the Packer script
  |             |___ parsec-install.sh         # the script to install PARSEC
  |             |___ post-installation.sh      # the script to install m5
  |             |___ runscript.sh              # script to run each workload
  |             |___ parsec-benchmark          # the parsec benchmark suite
  |
  |___ configs
  |      |___ system                           # system config directory
  |      |___ run_parsec.py                    # gem5 run script
  |
  |___ configs-mesi-two-level
  |      |___ system                           # system config directory
  |      |___ run_parsec_mesi_two_level.py     # gem5 run script
  |
  |___ README.md

Notice that there are two sets of system configuration directories and run scripts. For further detail on the config files look here.

Building the disk image

In order to build the disk-image for PARSEC tests with gem5, build the m5 utility in src/parsec-tests/ using the following:

git clone https://gem5.googlesource.com/public/gem5
cd gem5/util/m5
scons build/x86/out/m5

We use packer to create our disk-image. The instructions on how to install packer is shown below:

cd disk-image
wget https://releases.hashicorp.com/packer/1.6.0/packer_1.6.0_linux_amd64.zip
unzip packer_1.6.0_linux_amd64.zip

In order to build the disk-image first the script needs to be validated. Run the following command to validate disk-image/parsec/parsec.json.

./packer validate parsec/parsec.json

After the script has been successfuly validated you can create the disk-image by runnning:

./packer build parsec/parsec.json

You can find the disk-image in parsec/parsec-image/parsec.

gem5 run scripts

There are two sets of run scripts and system configuration files in the directory. The scripts found in configs use the classic memory system while the scripts in configs-mesi-two-level use the ruby memory system with MESI_Two_Level cache coherency protocol. The parameters used in the both sets of experiments are explained below:

• kernel: The path to the linux kernel used to run the experiments with. In these experiments we only used kernel version 4.19.83 (You can download the binary here).
• disk: The path to the PARSEC disk-image (The disk-image created above will work for both set of experiments).
• cpu: The type of cpu that is used to run the simulation with. There are two possible options: kvm (KvmCPU) and timing (TimingSimpleCPU).
• benchmark: The workload among 13 workloads of PARSEC. They include blackscholes, bodytrack, canneal, dedup, facesim, ferret, fluidanimate, freqmine, raytrace, streamcluster, swaptions, vips, x264. For further information on the workloads read here.
• size: The size of chosen workload. In our experiments we used only three different sizes. For the experiments with kvm size simsmall, simlarge, and native are used. For the experiments with timing only size simsmall has been used.
• num_cpus: Number of cpus used to run the simulation with. For experiments with classic memory (located in configs) only valid option is 1. However for the experiments with ruby memory (located in configs-mesi-two-level) the number of cores differ based on what cpu model is used the below table shows what core counts have been used with each cpu model.

CPU Model	Core Counts
KvmCPU	1,2,8
TimingSimpleCPU	1,2

Below are the examples of running an experiment with the two configurations.

gem5/build/X86/gem5.opt configs/run_parsec.py linux-stable/vmlinux-4.19.83 disk-image/parsec/parsec-image/parsec timing bodytrack simsmall 1

gem5/build/X86_MESI_Two_Level/gem5.opt configs-mesi-two-level/run_parsec_mesi_two_level.py linux-stable/vmlinux-4.19.83 disk-image/parsec/parsec-image/parsec timing raytrace simsmall 2

Working Status

The working status of PARSEC runs for gem5-20 has been documented here.